RAID hasn't been a realistic option with USB 2.0 because just one SATA drive can easily saturate the USB connection, according to Intrater. In addition, USB 2.0 has been limited in the kinds of devices it can power by itself. USB 3.0 can carry as much as 900 milliamps, up from just 500 milliamps for USB 2.0, he said. That will make it easier to power a portable RAID array of two drives, as well as to power faster-spinning HDDs than before and to charge some smartphones and other devices that the older standard couldn't fill up, Intrater said.

USB 3.0 was also designed to put fewer demands on a system's CPU during backup operations, he said. Products that support the new standard will be backward compatible with USB 2.0, so if any component in a set of linked devices isn't made for the USB 3.0, the connection will fall back to the older standard.

In addition to supporting RAID and the protocol conversion from SATA to USB 3.0, the Symwave chip can perform authentication and encryption. It uses the recently approved IEEE 1667 standard for authentication, which Microsoft has said it will include in Windows 7. For encryption, Symwave is using the XTS-AES technology, based on the Advanced Encryption Standard. System makers can choose to implement it in 128-bit or 256-bit mode, Intrater said.

Symwave, a fabless semiconductor company based in Laguna Niguel, California, was founded in 2004 and restructured itself last year around the goal of designing chips for the emerging USB 3.0 standard. It faced some challenges, including the speed of the protocol itself. At the 5GHz speed of USB 3.0, bits of data travel so fast that on a 10-foot cable there can be multiple bits traveling over the wire at the same time, Intrater said.

Price is another issue. The final products will have to stay close to the price range of USB 2.0 gear, with only a small premium, Intrater said. Despite the huge performance advantage, vendors won't be able to charge twice as much, he said.