Rick Merritt, EETimes
4/6/2011 3:24 PM EDT
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Three Apple engineers were awarded a patent Tuesday (#7,918,689) on a novel interface and connector for packing USB 3.0, DisplayPort and other traffic over one relatively small interconnect. The patent suggests a move to combo interfaces that could serve as flexible, high-speed ports for a wide range of mobile and desktop systems and protocols, potentially even supporting the new 10 Gbit/s Thunderbolt interface.