A high-speed connection: socket-equipped device on the left, captive-cable- or plug-equipped device on the right. If you use a multi-layer PCB with impedance-control for USB3 signals and treat your diffpairs with respect, your USB3 connection will generally work. USB3 is very, very simple – you have one TX and one RX pair, and while the transmission speeds are way higher than USB2, they’re manageable for a hacker. Plus, USB-C is flexible enough that a hacker could expose Ethernet or SATA over it in a USB-C-compliant way – and if that’s what you’re looking for, perhaps this overview is what helps you figure it out. This is not a complete or extensive list – for instance, I won’t be talking about stuff like USB4, in part because I don’t understand it well enough nor do I have experience with it that, and it’s certain we’ll get more USB-C-equipped high-speed devices in the future. Today, I’d like to show you what interfaces you can get out of those pins nowadays. If you’ve seen the pinout, you’ve seen the high-speed pins. Let’s go through what makes an altmode tick. That said, not all of them do – the USB3 is the simplest one. Most altmodes require digital USB-C communication, using a certain kind of messages over the PD channel. The three altmodes you can encounter nowadays are USB3, DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, there’s a few that have faded into obscurity like HDMI and VirtualLink, and some are up and coming like USB4. ![]() The ability to get a high-speed interface out of USB-C is called an Alternate Mode, “altmode” for short. ![]() When you have a device with high-speed needs exposed through USB-C, however, it’s glorious just how much USB-C can give you, and how well it can work. Not all devices take advantage of this capability, and they’re not required to – USB-C is designed to be accessible for every portable device under the sun. ![]() The pinout gives you four high-speed differential pairs and a few more lower-speed pairs, which let you pump giant amounts of data through a connector smaller than a cent coin. One amazing thing about USB-C is its high-speed capabilities.
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