Question: Is it acceptable to have a circuit board act as a passive feed through for USB signals? Specifically, what we wish to do is to have two single USB "Type B" connectors adjacent to one another on one side of the board and a dual-row "Type A" connector on the other. Pin-for-pin connections exist as printed traces on the board but there is no filtering or electrical "buffering" on the board; the connections, therefore, are totally passive. Is this sort of passive pass-through acceptable?
Answer: To be technically correct, you cannot. This would be a cable extension. In section 6.4.4 of the USB 2.0 specification it list them as one of the prohibited cables. It would allow someone the ability to have longer than 5 meters between two items (host/hub to hub/device). The extra connector would also cause problems when a high speed device was used.
