We have a new requirement to test systems with USB 3.0 ports. Does Passmark have plans to offer a loopback device for USB 3.0?
Announcement
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No announcement yet.
USB 3.0 Loopback?
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We do plan to develop a USB 3.0 Loopback device. Our preference is to use our current USB 2.0 IC chip supplier (Cypress) for USB 3.0 and they have not released a USB 3.0 chip. Once they do it will probably take us 4-6 months to produce the device. This time last year I would have thought we would have already developed a USB 3.0 loopback plug by now. But USB3 has been pretty slow across the entire industry. (Intel still don't support it on their motherboards).
Given the slow pace of Cypress (who claim they are "Market leader") we have looked at other chip manufacturers, like NEC. But there is no suitable chip on the market to build a device today. The best information we at the moment is that there will be suitable development samples chips in the next few months, with mass producing coming later.
(As a side note, there are suitable chips for USB3 host controllers, and USB3 to SATA bridging for external hard drives, but no general purpose USB3 chips with embedded micro controllers. We also looked a FPGA as a possible solution. Using FPGAs might have worked, but it would have been a very expensive solution, and redundant in a few months).
So it will happen as soon there are parts available on the market. I'll update this post with progress as we go along the path to developing a solution.
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As noted above a few days back, there have been delays and it is now looking more likely towards the end of the year.
We have some prototype firmware running now on a USB3 microcontroller. So we can do some basic looping of data and benchmarking. But there is much more to be done before it is a commercial product.
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