Adding 100W power delivery to a multichannel USB-to-UART bridge

New Products | March 11, 2020

By Nick Flaherty

Power Management

FTDI has developed multichannel USB-to-UART bridge chips that include the latest 100W USB-PD power delivery standard.

The dual channel FT2233HP and quad-channel FT4233HP chips bridge Hi-Speed USB at 480Mbits/s to serial UART RS232, RS422 or RS485 protocols as well as MPSSE, which includes the JTAG test protocol and I2C, SPI and Bit-Bang.

The bridge chips are fully compliant with Rev 3.0 of the USB power delivery (PD) specification up to 100W, and include a USB Type-C controller that handles all the link negotiation and power gauging. The 32bit RISC core offloads work that the system microcontroller would otherwise have to perform so that the system specification is not an issue for the interface. This enables equipment to either draw or provide power up to 100W as the design requires.

The 32bit core has 8kB of data RAM and 48kB of code ROM to run the the PD Policy Engine that manages the respective PD ports. The PD1 port can act as either a power sink or power source, while the PD2 port only acts as a power sink.

All the USB protocol handling is handled on chip, so there is no need for USB specific firmware programming in the system, which significantly streamlines the whole implementation process. FTDI also supplies royalty-free USB drivers for Windows, Linux, Mac and Android to avoid the need for developers to create their own drivers from scratch.

The FT2233HP and FT4233HP ICs are available in 76-pin QFN packages, as well as 80-pin LQFP packages. An extended operational temperature range of -40°C to 85°C is supported for deployment in harsh industrial environments.

This allows the bridge chips to be used in domestic appliances, test instrumentation, factory automation systems, power tools, lighting equipment, barcode readers and consumer electronics products.

www.ftdi.com