Providing USB Type-C connectivity - What you need to know

Kay Annamalai, Senior Marketing Director, Diodes Incorporated
EDN (September 29, 2016)

USB Type-C promises to be the answer to all our high-speed serial connectivity dreams, and more. Headlines have trumpeted its higher speeds and an increased power delivery capability, but what has probably captured most people’s attention is the fully reversible connector design, which is neither keyed nor needs different connectors at opposite of a cable. The cables and ports that have to provide this functionality can no longer be dumb electromechanical connections, however, but demand additional embedded intelligence to support these enhanced features.

The evolution of USB – A brief history

To fully appreciate what USB Type-C can offer and why we need it, we first need to understand how it builds on the previous USB standards, what features are genuinely new, and how to take advantage of the new features. The history of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) spans almost two decades. The original specification -- now referred to as USB 1.0 -- rapidly evolved to version 1.1, which was widely adopted for the connection of computer peripherals.

USB1.x supports a Low Speed data rate of 1.5Mbps and a Full Speed rate of 12Mbps for devices whose requirements range from human interfaces, such as joysticks, mice and keyboards, to printers and external disk drives. Cables provided a Type-A host plug on one end and a Type-B device plug on the other to ensure that power is only directed downstream from host to device. This two-type plug configuration prevented the possibility of electrical overload or damage if one computer was to be connected to another.

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