USB to kill the power brick

A better charge

Earlier today we talked to Jeff Ravencraft who is heading up the YSB Implementer’s Forum and among other things he told us the details of the new power delivery standard for USB.

The standard is being worked on by the Promoter’s Group and will allow charging of up to 7.5 on existing cables and up to 100W on new cables that are specifically designed to support the standard.  Fires are bad you know.

There will be automatic negotiation of charging between host and client, which means that a wall adapter can function either as a client and charge a laptop through the host port or as a host and charge a smartphone through the client port.

In essence this means that the power brick will face certain death in the future and will be replaced by a single wall charger that can charge any device.

You can of course also daisy chain your smartphone off of your computer and then charge the computer from the wall adapter and the smartphone from your computer – all at the same time.

On another note Jeff Ravencraft mentioned that there are now 275 certified USB 3.0 devices and host controllers from 7 different companies. The two latest controllers to be certified are two and four port controllers from VIA Labs.

While USB is certainly proliferating we don’t hear anything at all about Thunderbolt from Intel. A standard that is twice as fast as USB 3.0, but so far only implemented by very few manufacturers – mainly due to the very high cost of the technology.S|A

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