Automotive USB Type-C Power Delivery

USB Power delivery is the next frontier for in-car charging of phones, tablets and mobile PCs: a common cabling for data and power delivery is instrumental to improve re-use and reduce electronic waste; furthermore a cable reversibility enhances user-experience significantly.

The USB Power delivery protocol enables the connection of different devices with different power  profiles:the power negotiation protocol determines the voltage and current profile that the provider shall supply to the consumer. 

ST offers a  demo kit to evaluate the USB Power Delivery protocol stack version 2.0 implemented on the ASIL-B automotive grade 32-bit Power Architecture® microcontroller.

The kit is built out of a composition of basic boards: SPC58 MCU board with various peripherals (CAN, LIN, Ethernet among others) and an interface board hosting two USB Type-C controllers (STUSB1702) for two separate ports. On top of the interface board, a specific connector is provided for external power boards able to extend available power profiles (PDOs). Together with flexible hardware, an easy customizable software is provided: the software is built with different abstraction layers and is running parallel tasks on a free real-time operating system (RTOS).