Cypress USB-C controllers support Power Delivery 3.0

Article By : Vivek Nanda

Programmable, EZ-PD chips now support the latest USB-IF spec for a new class of charge-through dongles and docks.

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. has updated its USB-C controller portfolio with supports for USB Power Delivery (PD) 3.0 specification. The spec provides a number of changes over the previous version to enhance robustness in power sources, sinks and cables.

USB PD 3.0 offers the ability for an accessory to quickly change modes from sourcing to sinking power, preventing data corruption during a sudden disconnect of its power source. This feature, called fast role swap, enables charge-through dongles and docks. USB PD 3.0 also introduces an extended messaging capability that enables faster USB PD performance for firmware updates and offers a more-efficient mechanism to exchange security certificates. The extended messages can carry data payloads of up to 260B, compared to USB PD 2.0's 28B. USB PD 3.0 is fully backward-compatible with USB PD 2.0.

Cypress's USB-C controllers with PD 3.0 support includes EZ-PD CCG3 (block diagram shown below), which the company says is the most-integrated USB-C solution with authentication, and CCG4, which it claims is the only two-port USB-C solution so far. The EZ-USB HX3C, USB-C PD hub controller, and EZ-PD CCG2, a programmable USB-C solution, will add PD 3.0 support via a firmware upgrade later this year.

[Cypress CCG3 block diagram]
*__Figure 1:__ The CCG3 uses Cypress’s proprietary M0S8 technology with a 32bit, 48MHz ARM Cortex-M0 processor with 128KB flash, 8KB SRAM, 20 GPIOs, full-speed USB device controller and a Crypto engine for authentication.*

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