The 138 x 77mm board has a pair of Type-C power delivery ports – one that can both sink (receive) and source (provide) power, and another that can only sink power.
“The FT4233HP high-speed USB serial and FIFO evaluation board will enable engineers to get started on implementing USB power delivery arrangements,” according to the company. “This could be for the retrofitting of this functionality into legacy designs that are already in operation, or in relation to new items of equipment they are prototyping.”
Both ports are able to support 5, 9, 12, 15 and 20V power delivery object (PDO) profiles – as defined in revision 3.0 PD specification. “These profiles may be configured via attachment of an external EEPROM memory, with LED indicators signifying which PDO profile is in use,” according to FTDI.
The sink-and-source port also offers USB data transmission plus power delivery, while the sink-only one does not, and power pass-through can be initiated between the two ports.
Control is through the on-board I2C interface and the GPIO pins, allowing adjustment of the voltage regulator and the load switch.
FT4233HP is a four-channel chip with a 480Mbit/s interface (compliance is to USB 2.0 and USB PD 3.0), plus RS232, RS422, RS485, JTAG, I2C and SPI. Inside, a Type-C/PD policy engine on a 32bit RISC core (48kbyte rom and 8kbyte ram) runs the show – there is no need for USB-specific firmware programming. Royalty-free USB drivers are available for Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.
The FT4233HP evaluation board will be available in Q4 2021.