PCMCIA, a technology trade association, has announced that the new ExpressCard standard 2.0 is being developed to accommodate the significantly faster speeds. The release of the next-generation standard is expected to be published in the second half of 2008 or early 2009.

“Notebook and module developers will be able to take advantage of the ExpressCard 2.0 standard to create new, innovative consumer products that embrace its significantly increased performance,” said Brad Saunders, chairman of PCMCIA.

The new ExpressCard standard 2.0 will support transfer rates ranging from 2 to 10 times faster than ExpressCard Standard 1.2, which means speeds starting at 5Gb/s and up to 25Gb/s (625MB/s – 3.125MB/s). The ExpressCard standard 2.0 will enable manufacturers to develop higher performance ExpressCard products for consumers, including faster external hard disk drives or solid state drives, external graphics adapters and other bandwidth hungry multimedia products for mobile computers.

The ExpressCard standard is based on the advanced serial I/O technologies, PCI Express and USB. The ExpressCard 2.0 Standard will also support the new SuperSpeed USB, which is planned for release later this year as part of the USB 3.0 specification. The new SuperSpeed USB standard will support speeds of up to 10 times faster than Hi-Speed USB.

The ExpressCard 2.0 standard will support backward compatibility with products compliant with any previous releases of the standard. A new compliance program will be phased in once the ExpressCard 2.0 Standard is released. Current ExpressCard plug’n’play applications include memory, local area network (LAN), wireless broadband (WWAN), WiFi, memory adapters, parallel adapters, serial adapters, TV tuners, smart card readers, instrumentation, 1394adapters, Serial ATA (SATA) adapters and USB adapters.