“Given the substantial use of USB for IoT and non-IoT developments, the Type-C™ connector should have an impressive impact on interconnect designs and developments.”
“The USB Type-C Connector: USB will never be the same”, Embedded Computing Design (Sept 17, 2015), written by Dr. Jerry Krasner, Ph. D., Vice President of Embedded Market Forecasters, tells us about the rapidly growing development and implementation of the Type-C USB connector (USB-C).
The Type-C USB connector was introduced about a year ago, and it already shows tremendous impact on developers and the market.
“As the industry transitions to Type-C connectors, an increase in product designers' creativity will result because they can now use one port to connect with various different products. “One USB Type-C connector supports multiple serial technologies. For developers, this feature provides the flexibility of using one port to interface various high-speed interconnects. This flexibility makes it easy to incorporate off-the-shelf items in new designs, which can greatly reduce the cost of both development and production. This feature also makes it easier to interface various products to work together. How are developers responding to this?
A recent 2015 EMF Survey of Embedded Developers shows that 16.5% of developments are using the USB-C connector.
The following table shows the overall plans that developers have for interconnect technologies. Note the extensive use of USB technologies, and that both IoT and IoT developers are taking this technical advantage.
Table 1: Interconnect Technologies Planned for Next Generation Products, 2015 EMF Survey of Embedded Developers, Sept 17, 2015“USB Type-C is the new universal USB connector that replaces the entire plethora of medium, small, and large connectors that are used in your cell phones and your PCs with one small, easy-to-use connector.”
To meet these growing demands and to successfully explore and further develop this wide spreading technology, Total Phase offers the USB Power Delivery Analyzer. The hardware capabilities of this tool include the following:
- Sniffing Power Delivery (PD) traffic on Control Channel lines
- Transparent interposing on a USB Type-C connection
- Monitor VBUS and VCONN voltages and currents
- Injecting PD packets on CC1 or CC2 lines
- Putting Rd/Rp/Ra resistors on Control Channel Lines
Figure 1: Example of Using USB Power Delivery AnalyzerAdditional resources that you may find helpful include the following:
If you have questions about our USB Power Delivery Analyzer or other Total Phase products, feel free to email us at sales@totalphase.com, or if you already own one of our devices and have a technical question, please submit a request for technical support.