How to Easily Add USB Power Delivery to a Design

In this video, we’ll cover some of the aspects of USB power delivery, or USB PD, which greatly expands on the simple 5 V supply built into regular USB.

Using an ACDC Converter and Mini Consumer Boards to Add USB Power to a Design

In this video, we’ll cover some of the aspects of USB power delivery, or USB PD, which greatly expands on the simple 5 V supply built into regular USB. In fact, USB PD can provide up to 100 W, with devices acting as providers and consumers, negotiating the proper voltage and current levels for optimum power delivery. To demonstrate that, we have a few boards from ROHM Semiconductor.
We have the AC-to-DC converters, which act as providers. We have both a 45 W and a 100 W converter and, of course, the 100 W is larger to accommodate the larger inductors and capacitors.

ACDC converter

We have the mini consumer board, which has a controller on it which is set to request a specific voltage and current level from a provider once it's plugged in. Now, the design is space-optimized and meant to be copied-and-pasted into your design, which gives you a known good solution without having to develop your own.

Mini consumer board

And we have the eval kits. The eval boards give designers access to all the pins on the controllers so you can get a better idea of what's going on and how USB PD operates. They're best for designers who are trying to customize their power profile or use the controllers with an embedded processor.

Eval kits

We also have this demo unit, which has a 100 W AC-to-DC converter, as well as these four mini consumer boards.

Demo unit with four mini consumer boards

On the supply, there is a controller acting in the provider role. And on each of these consumer boards, there's another controller acting in the consumer role. Anytime I plug into one of these consumer boards, the two controllers communicate over either the CC1 or CC2 pin, depending on the cable orientation. The consumer board requests its desired current and voltage level.
So, if your design requires a 20 V input, then you can take this mini consumer board, which is a known good design, and copy-and-paste it right into your design and you have 20 V at up to 5 A. If, on the other hand, you need a 5 V supply, you can take the 5 V controller, drop that same design into your solution.
You can leverage all the benefits of USB power delivery at any of these voltages. So if we go to 9 V, you see we get 9 V on the output.




Again, this is all happening as these two controllers communicate and the provider reconfigures its output to deliver the appropriate voltage over the USB cable.
USB PD and USB Type-C provide great benefits in powering and charging devices over traditional USB and other alternatives. The adapters and mini-consumer boards here from ROHM make it easy to quickly implement this functionality into your design, while the controllers they’re based on can be used for custom solutions.

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