USB4 Deep Dive: What Every IT Professional Should Know

Hello, my name is Lowell Vanderpool, and this channel is dedicated to IT students, IT professionals, and anyone who enjoys learning technical subjects. Now, very honestly, in the past, USB was one of those technologies that IT pros didn't really have to worry about or have some kind of deep understanding or go to a local university or community college and take a course on because it was just simple and straightforward, and it worked for the most part, until somebody brought you a flash drive with tears in their eyes saying that they had three weeks worth of spreadsheets on there, and now their computer is saying that it needs to be formatted. That's when you either give them good news or you hand them a box of Kleenex. Outside of that, USB has been one of those that we could kind of just brush aside, but with USB 3.2, Generation 1 and 2, and USB 4, those days have come to an end. There are new cables, new standards, new thorough... Now, most of us grew up with USB 2.0. It produces about 500 milliamps at 5 volts, and that wattage is about 2.5 watts. Maximum throughput, 480 megabits, which I don't think anyone ever saw. Many connectors could be used with USB 2.0. Cable length about 3 meters. USB 4, 5 volts up to, are you ready, 48 volts to a maximum of 240 watts. Trust me, USB 4 is not anything like USB 2.0. USB 4 runs up to 40 gigabits per second, strictly USB Type-C, and we're going to be using the Type 2.1 connector. Cable length, if you want 40 gigabits, has to be less than 0.8 meters. USB 4.0 is as complicated a technology as anything we deal with. The USB standard now calls for any Type-C cable that supports 5 amps or exceeds 60 watts to carry a new chip. It's called an e-marker chip, and you can see it in the picture. It has to be a USB Type 2.1 connector. The e-mark chip is an electronic label, and it provides the devices that can use this cable to understand cable characteristics, cable length, maximum supported current, voltage, type of USB signal, vendor product ID, and any alternative mode. As of the time that I produced this video, there was only one chip, the AMD 6000 mobile CPU that right out of the box supports USB 4.0 at 40 gigabits. Now in the world of USB 4, we're using terms like fabric and routers and switching mechanisms. At 20 giga support for DisplayPort, PCI Express, USB 3.2, we're having to use routers and switches to dynamically pass traffic through this USB 4 fabric. If you want to bump it up to 40 gigabits per second, you've got to make sure that cable is less than 0.8 meters. Now I'm not going to go back and talk about any USB standard beyond USB 3.2. At the 3.2 level, we can see it supports USB 2, 3, USB power delivery, which we'll get into that, alternate modes. So USB 3.2 does support alternate modes, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 3. USB 4.0 is going to support 2, 3 USB power delivery, DisplayPort, PCI Express, and as an alternate mode, Thunderbolt. So what is alternate modes? It simply means that USB will support different data protocols like Thunderbolt, Data Display, MHL, and Virtual Link without any kind of special active adapters. You must have a Windows 10 or a Mac that does support these alternate modes. Now most alternate mode implementations are going to be from a display. So if you're going to be buying these high-end displays, they're going to provide USB alternate mode supporting Thunderbolt, power delivery up to 96 watts, USB-C at 3.0, 3.2, DisplayPort, HDMI. This professional Dell monitor has the USB alternate mode support. Supports up to 4 USB-C at 10 gigabits, power delivery at 90 watts, USB 3.2 Gen 2 with 4 Type-A download stream ports. It's important to understand that USB 3.2 and USB 4, when we use alternate modes, actually reconfigures the USB-C connector, repurposes the pins to support these alternate buses such as Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, and others. Now USB 4 is only going to use the USB-C connector. It uses what is known as protocol tunneling. All USB 4 devices can support between 5 amps and 20 volts. Remember, most of your laptops easily run on 19 volts. So now if you have a display that can power 90 watts, 120 watts, 240 watts, you can easily charge your laptop off the display. It will also support Thunderbolt 3 in alternate mode. In May of 2021, the USB standard introduced the Type 2.1 USB-C connector. That will allow power capacity of cables and connectors from 100 watts to 240 watts, making it possible to power and charge very power-hungry devices such as 4K monitors, e-bikes, gaming laptops, and on and on. Now let's talk about the dirty secret of USB. I like USB. It's just reliable, so many things support it, but it's a disappointment. If you've ever bought storage externally and you've used USB to connect to your PCs, you're unhappy. Now you can see from this picture on this slide that with USB's 40 gigabit speed, it's going to allow the connectivity of USB to an NVMe adapter with a solid-state hard drive in there. That sounds so cool, but it's going to disappoint. Why? The dirty little secret of USB is known as an interface chip, or many times you'll see it referred to as a bridge chip. You can't just connect USB to NVMe. There has to be an interface, something that interfaces between the two technologies. And there lies the ugly, because those bridge chips, if they're not well-designed and you don't have a good engineering team that thoroughly understands the design criteria and knows how to implement a very good interface or bridge chip, you can have the fastest USB in the world and a great technology over here, but when you go through that bridge chip, you're losing 20% of your throughput. Because USB tends to fall in the low-cost category, the money, the effort, the time, and that all money to develop really good bridge interface chips just doesn't happen. So you get really fast USB, really fast NVMe, plug them together. This has been a problem with USB from the very beginning. Anytime you had USB to SATA, USB to UART or industrial scientific use, USB to SD Express, anything from USB to something always brought in an interface or a bridge chip. And if it's not well done, it works. I guess we can't complain. So here's an example, and I don't know anything about this product, but here's an example of what I'm talking about. This is a new memory stick that'll be for the newest version of USB 3.2 Gen, 2x2, and it's got the new Silicon Motion interface chip. Who knows? These engineers may have done a great job. I hope so. I'm looking forward to well-designed products at this 40 gig speed. I would love it. Let's look at the chart for USB 3.2. You can see at the top USB 3.2 Gen 1, which is five gigabits, times one, which is one lane, one serial transmission, just like we talk PCI Express with one lane, and your total bandwidth with that generation in one lane is five gigabits per second. Then you have Gen 3.2 Gen 2 with one lane. You start off at 10 gigabits. With one lane, you get 10 gigabits aggregate bandwidth, and you can look down the rest of the chart. Get comfortable with that. That's important, especially as you're choosing products for your company. Now take a look at USB 4. We've got USB 4 Gen 2 with two lanes, 20 gigabits. With USB Gen 3 with two lanes, you're going to get 40 gigabits. Once you get into USB 4 and 40 gigabits, choose your cables. When you look at this USB-C cable here in the picture, it's cross-cut, and it's sitting beside a ballpoint pen, so you can reference the size. Look at that cable. It's got eight shielded micro coax cables for transmit and receive. That's how we're getting 40 gigabits in this USB-C cable. You actually no longer have a cable, but a transmission line. So here we have a picture of the actual pinout of a USB-C connector. We can see four differential signal pairs, and that's what gives us our 40 gigabits per second. We also see the minus D and the D plus. That's the old backward compatibility pins for USB 2.0. Now you'll see SBU1 and SBU2. Those are called sideband use, and those are dedicated for the alternate mode, really for Thunderbolt. You also see the CC pins that are in red. Those are used for configuration to determine whether, which way you have flipped the connection as you plugged it in. They're also for power distribution. Our VBUS pins are probably the largest wires in the cable, and they are the ones that help deliver high current at whatever voltage is delivered. And then, of course, our ground pins. Now this layout is designed specifically to provide the least amount of crosstalk, reducing EMI, and providing maximum isolation between all the signals that are being transmitted and received. Now these Amp-N-All connectors, they're a manufacturer of connectors. Their USB-C connectors and plugs are designed for over 10,000 meeting cycles. Highly reliable. Now there is discussion about a USB-C connector power only. In other words, they're not worried about data transfer at all. The USB-C connector and cable is for power. On the top, you see the connector and the pins that will be for a 100-watt cable. The one on the bottom has all eight pins used is going to be the 240-watt. When I got to studying the cable, I was just amazed. I don't know how China is able to manufacture the high-quality cable that it takes to make this very complex cable or transmission line at the prices they're doing. It's amazing. These are very complex cables. There's another view from a manufacturer of the USB-C cable. And again, you can just see the detail and the complexity of creating this cable. As you're looking at USB-C and higher power, make sure you buy a high-quality cable. This one is very well-designed. This is the inside of the USB-C jack where you would plug in a USB cable. Notice that the copper lands that come down in the plug are always the ones that are the longest and that connect first are always ground. The same thing is with SATA. You look at a SATA connector, both power and data, the longest pads, the things that connect first will always be ground. Round the system, then connect your signals. So what does USB-4 look like to an engineer? It looks like silicon on either end of the device with a transmission line between the two. We use protocol tunneling to take display port and PCI through a USB-4 fabric. Here's a diagram indicating the USB firmware stack. Now, industrial controls love USB. Now, they connect to all kinds of bizarre electronic devices, but USB is such a popular interface back to industrial control systems. Every time I go into a hospital, I'm seeing more and more medical equipment using the USB connection. Because of USB simplicity, its reliability, you're seeing a lot of medical devices incorporate USB into their design. This is a great view of Microsoft's view of USB. Look at how much is in kernel mode. There's a ton of drivers, both for USB 2.0 driver stack, USB 3.0 driver stack, a lot of technology in the kernel mode, and a little bit in the user mode. In the developer's site for Microsoft, this is some of the block diagrams used by developers for developing USB software for a webcam. And of course, what does USB look like to our users? They love those flash drives. What does USB look to the IT pro? He's got to understand the standards, knowing what to purchase, knowing what to connect, understanding USB electrical power standards, understanding and troubleshooting complex new USB technologies, and learning to look through the hype and choosing practical solutions for his or her company. Here is the most recent packaging logo and port and cable logo for both USB 4.0 20 gigabits and USB 4.0 40 gigabits. On USB 3.2, it must support at least 7.5 watts on a USB-A port. USB-C ports should support at least 30 watts. Now, this was interesting as I dove into this topic is there's now two categories of charger port. One is called assured capacity, where each port is able to deliver its rated laboral power capacity independent of all other ports. Look at our diagram at the bottom on the left. We have a 30 watt, a 15 watt, and a 15 watt. That port can give 30, 15, and 15 simultaneously assured. Now, the other category is called shared ports. Each port is able to deliver up to its rated label power capacity depending on the remaining available capacity that is shared by a group of multiple ports. Look at the graphic on your right. You see 27 watts, 27 watts, 27 watts, but notice its total is 60. So, if I plug in two 27 watt mobile phones, there's only six watts left on that top jack. So, be aware that there's now assured charging ports and shared capacity charging ports. Now, here's a great chart that brings us back up to the various colors found on USB plugs. We all know the black and the white, the blue USB 3.0. Now, we have teal and red and yellow and orange. So, make sure you review the chart, come up to speed with what these USB colors are and what do they indicate. Now, let's talk about troubleshooting USB. My workstation as an instructor and as an IT professional became a grand central station for plugging in USB flash drives. In fact, external hard drives, you name it. So, I would have students bring me their work on a flash drive and I would plug it in, get what I needed off, or a staff member would bring their external and give me some kind of data that I needed and related to my job. And over the course of time, I began to have some really, really bizarre problems. Pop in a flash drive, nothing happened. It just wouldn't do anything. It wouldn't even recognize that I plugged it in. Now, I was used to problems with flash drives, but this became a big problem. And then I found Nerfsoft's USB View Utility. Saved my life. Now, Nerfsoft has what's called a USB device view. This simple utility allows you to see all USB devices that you have plugged in, extended information about every device that you've plugged in. It also allows you to uninstall USB devices that you previously used and disconnect USB devices that are currently connected to your computer as well as disable or enable USB devices. It even allows you to do this remotely if you have admin rights. Now, everybody doesn't have the problem of being the grand central station of plugging USB devices into like my situation was. But this tool quickly allowed me to go in and find out all USB drivers, edited elements of my registry and get rid of them since they were only plugged in one time and clean out my registry and my driver list so that those funky problems went away. Now, this utility is not going to solve everybody's problems. But just for example, if I go to options, I can go ahead and display disconnected devices. And if you scroll down, there they are. So, I can go to any one of these and uninstall. Now, it removes it from my registry. If it added a driver, it takes it out. It's a simple solution to some people's problems. It is a portable app. It is a tool worth your time. Now, we know that Device Manager is super helpful in solving some USB problems. But often when I find conflict of drivers or failed drivers in my USB Device Manager, I go back to Nerfsoft and find that device, uninstall it, try reinstalling, and many times it goes in. Remember, when you're looking at Device Manager and you see the host controller, those are the actual chips that are on your motherboard. Now, drivers are a common problem with USB. And Microsoft delivers a large majority of the drivers we use in our USB stack. When possible, try and go back to your motherboard manufacturer, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, Asus, whoever is your motherboard manufacturer and see if there's updated drivers in your USB. Now, all of us at some point in our career, if you're in IT, you've had people bring to you a flash drive or an external hard drive and they're desperate to get the data off of it. Something went wrong and you need to recover the data. Steve Gibson, and I'm on his home, I'm on his page for Spinrite, produces a product called Spinrite 6.0. That's the latest version as of this video. It is the best software out there for any kind of disc recovery. NVMe, SAS, flash, USB flash drive, SD cards. Spinrite 6.0 is the best software for recovery. It's not free. It's about $89 right now on his website. But if you want something that works and can recover, don't waste your money. Get Spinrite 6.0. It's excellent. It's been around for years and years. Very well respected developer. So check it out. I'll put a link in the video description. 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In a professional environment, very often you need USB beyond a cable length of three meters. So in the case of the USB 3.2 Gen 1, about 10 gigabits, you're going to have to buy something like this. This is called a fiber active optical cable. Gives you about 65 feet without any signal loss and can transfer 10 gigabits. They also have specialized cable for total electrical isolation. This one is a USB 4 cable with fiber. So it has total electrical isolation. This prevents ground looping, harsh EMI, RFI environments. So there are a lot of specialty cables. They're not cheap, but they can solve some really difficult problems. USB does allow longer cables, but you have to bring in what's called retimer circuits. So if you do extend the cable, these cables have to provide some type of retiming and resyncing functionality in the transfer of the data. So here's a diagram of those active type cables where we put repeaters and retiming circuits. Notice it doesn't impact so much the power distribution. We still can get 30, 60, even a hundred Watts. Sometimes you need USB extended even over longer distance. This particular product allows you to extend USB over a hundred meters, over a cat six, a or a seven unshielded twisted pair. And if you need that long haul, here's a device that takes USB 3.2 Gen 2 over one kilometer. Now, every weekend I go riding with my engineering buddy and on the bike trail, he turned to me and said, why don't you buy one of those USB multimeters? And I looked at him and I said, why would I ever want to buy a USB multimeter? So I got out his phone at the next stop and went on Amazon and showed me all these cool new USB multimeters. So I bought one and I started playing with it. And I'm going to show you why you may want to buy one of these USB multimeters. So keep your eyes open for our upcoming video on USB testers.