Another example: you can buy a small and cheap USB C to DisplayPort adapter with power passthrough (< 20 USD). You can buy a (relatively) small and cheap USB C to dual DisplayPort MST hub (<50 USD). You can not buy a USB C to dual DisplayPort MST hub with power passthrough unless it's a full dock, huge in size and expensive (200 USD at least).
*may destroy motherboard
Consider how much a 10 GbE card still costs -- this is the same speed! Apparently, it's not cheap making chips working with 10-20-40 gigabit/s line speeds but the market demands low cost. USB C wouldn't get far if a plain USB C to DP adapter would cost a hundred bucks.
You can thank the laws of physics for that because at 10+ gbit data rates you start needing crazy internal clock speeds (which can be significantly higher than the input clocks). Since the distance a signal can travel before it loses too much energy to register logic HIGH is proportional to the wavelength, you have to pack everything close enough while still doing what your specs call for. In the case of 10GigE and USB Type C, this means having to move to smaller fabrication processes than most companies are prepared for or even have access to.
Most protocols designed to be that fast are either massively parallelized to avoid this problem like PCIe/DDR2+ or very expensive to implement as peripherals/silicon like MIPI3/10GigE/USB Type C.
The only strange thing here is how five years ago we already had USB 3.0 and DP 1.2 devices in abundance but ten gig is still somewhat problematic.
That is why we need competitions. Sadly patents also prevent competitions from happening.
Why do you think that is? Is there something in the spec that's holding anyone back? or is it a chicken and egg problem where no one invests in Type C because no one has yet?
If another resistor is used to signal higher currents using that cable could fry peripherals that follow the USB 2.0 spec.
Also, I don't know much about USB 2.0 but I thought we had a whole slew of proprietary solutions for fast charging and all were incompatible with each other. So it was quite messy even before USB C came and made everything even worse.
For charging though you generally wan't to slow charge as it greatly reduces wear on batteries anyway.
I thought heat was the primary source of wear. And fast charge produces lots of heat regardless if it's in the middle of the range or not.
Sorry no good references to offer off hand, this is all just stuff I've been told by engineers and chemists. Take with a grain of salt.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyS8/comments/7fg4sk/should_i_s...
I'm not saying the link above is supposed to be more credible than your post. But it is an alternative view point that resonates with most of what I've read.
For the same reason Tesla recommends you to not over-use supercharging (though this obviously is a sensitive subject), since it puts a toll on batteries - and Tesla unlike most other battery peripherals actually have good and active cooling.
However I'm still not sure heat is the first order effect limiting charge rates. If you consider that the charge efficiency of the cell is something around 99%, the total losses at a 1C rate relative to the thermal mass of the cell are pretty negligible ( nominally, around 3.6mW per A of charge current ). I'd wager that when your cellphone heats up under charge, that's primarily due to losses in the ~90+% efficient charger circuitry. Heat is heat, and that is still not good for the battery of course. I believe the cooling system in the Tesla is primarily for when the cells are being discharged, but it would be really interesting to hear the full story on that from a Tesla engineer.
I found the below link which also seems to imply the lithium plating as well as other chemical effects are the first order issues. http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/bu_808b_what_caus...
Regarding Tesla supercharging I found this: https://www.teslarati.com/watch-tesla-battery-thermal-manage...
I also heard of issues of other cars (don't remember brand) who can't perform a supercharge - some driving - and then another supercharge because the batteries would overheat (still from the previous supercharge), preventing long trips.
Wouldn't the expensive products you mention that "might work" become more affordable if they were manufactured at a higher rate? (But maybe they aren't because they are harder to sell)
>I am confident that Type-C's market penetration will skyrocket as soon as the difficulty and cost of actually integrating it into a product reaches sane levels.
Isn't the current market of so many low-cost Type-C devices evidence that the cost is already low?
Can't you just hook up the VCC and ground from any USB charging IC to a type-c socket? It's all +5v right? I don't understand why the type of connector dictates how fast a cable should be useful for charging. That seems like it should be up to the simple gauge and length of the wire and thus how much current it can handle.
From what I've heard re: that chart in OP's link that shows the different fast charge rates for different manufacturer's wall warts and cables, most of that is caused by proprietary ICs doing sneaky things like throttling the charge rate when it discovers it isn't connected to an official Huawei cable or whatever through some resistor value going to ground from one of the data lines, or some similar method. Couldn't the IC in the device read the resistance / inductance of the cable and determine through that how much current it could handle? I feel like this is all bad faith shenanigans through proprietary cable DRM. When charging is concerned, a conductor is a conductor assuming there's enough thickness to prevent overheating, right?
So you put one resistor in for a low rated C to C cable, another for a higher C to C rated, and yet another for an A to C converter (indicating that the C end should fall back to the older battery charging spec).
Guess how many fly by night cable manufacturers get those wrong...
the C to C spec charging, or Power Delivery, spec is a whole different barrel of stinking fish. Where you can have everything from 0.5A at 5V to multiple As at 20V running over the same C to C cable.
This is akin to the Qualcomm quickcharge scheme that run 9V over existing micro-USB cables and ports (thus allowing higher wattage without cranking up the amps).
There is an entire protocol to negotiate power delivery (including who charges who) http://www.usb.org/developers/powerdelivery/
Or, if you're really unlucky, it'll attempt to charge your wall. No, I'm not joking: https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/941820122406064128
:-)
For sake of a simple example, consider designing a rechargeable flashlight. For whatever reason, you'd like it to be rechargeable over a USB-C port. You also want the flashlight to charge as fast as possible from whatever power source you connect it to, because you know people will need to charge it quickly. To do that, the ideal solution would be a single IC that sits on the USB port and monitors D+/D-, CC1/2, and the rail voltages and sets a few GPIOs to tell your battery charge circuit what is and isn't allowed on this port.
Inexplicably, _that chip doesn't exist_. It does exist for USB 2.0 (that is, BC1.2), available from several vendors, and works perfectly. There are solutions marketed for Type-C... but they don't touch USB 2.0. That means someone who uses a Type-A to Type-C cable with a beefy older Type-A charger doesn't get fast charging. There are some bigger Type-C products that might work, but they're incredibly complex, physically large, expensive, often in BGA packages, and will blow out every line on your budget.
Admittedly it's been about a year since I turned over every stone in the industry searching for my Magical Unicorn Charging IC (like the ones that exist for USB 2.0...), but I do pay attention to new product releases and I haven't seen anyone going in this direction. Probably you could get something customized (at medium volumes) or certainly full custom (at high volumes), but if volumes or margins are low enough to require COTS parts, there really aren't any workable solutions.
I am confident that Type-C's market penetration will skyrocket as soon as the difficulty and cost of actually integrating it into a product reaches sane levels.