1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a connector, in particular to a USB female connector.
2. Description of Prior Art
Universal Serial Bus (referred to as “USB” hereinafter) is a signal transmission interface which is most widely used in peripheral products of personal computers. The USB is originally proposed by Intel and Microsoft, and three versions of USB (USB 1.0, USB 1.1, and USB 2.0) have been developed until now. USB 1.0 is configured to achieve a low-speed signal transmission rate of 1.5 Mbps. USB 1.1 is configured to achieve a full-speed signal transmission rate of 12 Mbps. USB 2.0 is configured to achieve a high-speed signal transmission rate of 480 Mbps.
However, with the rapid development of electronic industries, even the signal transmission rate of USB 2.0 cannot satisfy the demands of certain advanced electronic industries. Thus, a novel signal transmission interface of USB 3.0 is developed. The USB 3.0 is configured by adding two pairs of differential terminals and a grounding terminal to the original four terminals of the USB 2.0. As a result, the USB 3.0 has nine terminals and thus its signal transmission rate can be increased up to 5 Gbps.
According to prior art, an existing female connector of the USB 3.0 standard includes an insulation body. A tongue plate extends from a front end of the insulation body. Electrical-conductive portions for the additional five terminals and other electrical-conductive portions for the original four terminals are provided on the opposite surfaces of the tongue plate respectively. Since the positions of these nine terminals have been standardized, the additional five terminals are located in a higher level than that of the original four terminals. That is, the nine terminals are arranged in two rows in a vertical direction, thereby avoiding short circuit.
However, since the peripheral products and associated connectors of the computers are required to be made more and more compact, arranging nine terminals on a small tongue plate really increases the difficulty in manufacturing and assembling the USB 3.0 female connector. As a result, the volume of the USB female connector cannot be made compact further.
Therefore, it is an important issue for the present Inventor to solve the above-mentioned problems.