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Anker PowerPort PD 1 USB-C Wall Charger Teardown
- theamk 8y agoI was looking forward for Ken Shriiff-style charger reviews ([0], [1]) and was disappointed to find out this is just pictures, with almost no analysis. FWIW, from the photos, it looks like the charger is not very bad from safety perspective -- there is a wide, healthy space between high and low side. (unless there is a diagonal trace in the "The back of the PCB" photo, between high and low voltage sides.. but it is so absurd if true, I think it is just a camera artifact) [0] http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and... [1] http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-ap...
- joezydeco 8y ago"The usage of the highly integrated PI controller reduce the number of additional components required for the system" There's a lot of clunky grammar in this post. Maybe it's a submarine advertisement?
- opencl 8y agoThe clunky grammar is because the site is run by Chinese people who do not have particularly great English skills.
- adrianmonk 8y agoAnker (the company whose product is profiled) is also run by Chinese people. Which proves absolutely nothing, of course. But it is consistent with how this sort of thing might happen. Companies often hire someone from their own country to do stuff for them. EDIT: I think people have not understood what I'm saying here. I'm not trying to imply anything bad about Anker. I'm trying to explain what the comment two levels above mine may have been implying. The fact that this site is Chinese isn't a refutation of the scenario they're suggesting, it's part of it. (On a side note, I charged my phone on an Anker charger last night.)
- pasbesoin 8y agoI thought it was started by some Xooglers. Obviously, the products are coming from China, and I imagine a lot of the design work is done there, now. After its launch, the emphasis seemed to be a decent level of quality, i.e. it will actually be what it says on the tin. The specs we provide, it will conform to. Which has led me to turn to Anker products in order to get a "known quality." Has this changed?
- lozaning 8y agoWikipedia suggests that it was a singular xoogler, but other than that this aligns with what I know to be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anker_(electronics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anker_(electronics)
- adrianmonk 8y agoI'm certainly not aware of any change. I continue to regard Anker as a reputable brand which seems to try to offer good quality products at a budget price. I'm just playing devil's advocate here. Someone advanced a theory that it could be "submarine advertisement", another person said the explanation is just that the site is Chinese, and I said that doesn't refute the notion. I'm not trying to defend that position; I'm just trying to keep the reasoning sound once that the exploration of that hypothetical has started.
- mdorazio 8y ago> once that the exploration There's a lot of clunky grammar in your post. Maybe it's a submarine advertisement? See how ridiculous it is to assume grammar errors imply nefarious ends? You're not playing devil's advocate, you're backing up a crackpot statement.
- adrianmonk 8y agoI'm not backing anybody up. If someone tries to refute a crackpot but their refutation doesn't make logical sense, then their refutation doesn't make logical sense. If I point this out, it doesn't mean I support the crackpot. Logic and rational discourse are not a game where there are only two sides, and a statement against one is automatically a statement in support of the other.
- kens 8y ago> I was looking forward for Ken Shirriff-style charger reviews Ha ha, thanks! I agree with you that it looks okay from a safety perspective. It looks like they built the charger with reasonable quality, not cutting corners, but it's not at the Apple level of (over-)engineering. The one sketchy thing is the charger panel that just pops off (instead of being glued/welded), potentially exposing the user to high voltage. One interesting thing is the amount of complexity that USB-C adds. The charger has a separate daughter board for the Cypress USB-C controller chip. This chip contains a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M0 CPU running at 48 MHz. I believe that works out to about 8 Cray 1 supercomputers using the Dhrystone benchmark. The switching power supply is a quasi-resonant flyback topology. To oversimplify, the incoming AC is rectified to DC, chopped up into pulses that are fed through the flyback transformer. The output from the transformer is rectified, yielding the low-voltage, high-current DC output. One somewhat advanced feature is that the output is not rectified by a diode, but by a MOSFET controlled by the controller chip. This is called synchronous rectification. This improves efficiency because you don't have the voltage drop you get across a diode. The SMPS controller chip is interesting. Most switching power supplies have an optoisolator to provide feedback between the output and the control chip. But this control chip connects to both the input side and output side; it contains an inductive isolator internally. The control chip also contains the MOSFET that chops up the input voltage. So the big controller chip replaces multiple components in a typical charger. The LED indicator is a bit puzzling. There's a TL431 voltage reference chip next to it. The TL431 is extremely common in chargers to provide the feedback for voltage regulation, but apparently it's being used here to drive the LED.
- RandallBrown 8y agoYou're saying that our phone chargers have the equivalent of EIGHT of the fastest computers in the world in 1976? Wow.
- nimish 8y agoA usb c controller is quite complicated. The protocol is not simple at all.
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- londons_explore 8y agoI would expect a brand-name device claiming to support USB-C PD to support the 15 and 20v modes too, so it can at least charge a laptop. All the components I checked are already capable of it, so I guess some tests failed and they rushed it to market without 15 and 20v support?
- amphigory 8y agohttp://www.chargerlab.com/archives/539.html http://www.chargerlab.com/archives/539.html This one is for laptops. Very compact and provides 60W. I use it with Lenovo X1 Carbon.
- Johnny555 8y agoDo you need to use the 15V or 20V modes to supply 18W to a laptop or can the laptop just use the 2A@9V? I can plug my Macbook into a 5V only USB phone charger and it says it's charging (ok, it doesn't really keep up with the power usage, so the battery still drains, but it drains slower than it would if not plugged into anything at all)
- williw 8y agoDon't you risk of overheating the charger?
- Johnny555 8y agoThe device and charger are supposed to negotiate an appropriate charge rate. If the charger agrees to supply more than it's capable of, that sounds like a defect.
- jeffmcjunkin 8y agoMany laptops require higher voltage. My XPS 13 does require 20V, for example.
- sowbug 8y agoIt's very mysterious that it's so particular about the charger. The XPS 13's battery is only 7.4V, so that's not the reason (a simple charging circuit needs a higher input voltage than the top voltage of the battery it's charging). It's hard to say that the poor implementation of USB-PD ruins the XPS 13, because it's overall a great laptop. But it is very annoying to travel with this computer, realize that you brought only an 18w or 30w charger, and contemplate how nearly every other device you have works fine with it. And every year since 2016 I decline to upgrade my XPS 13 because they haven't fixed this (moreover they probably don't even consider it a problem).
- londons_explore 8y agoSurprising that this doesn't use a higher frequency to reduce the iron core size and make the device smaller and lighter. Perhaps the product designers said 'it's gotta weigh at least 5 oz' and the engineers thought they'd use old-fashioned huge low frequency 20kHz flyback transformers rather than put a steel weight in.
- theamk 8y agoController datasheet shows the frequency of 30 KHz to 100 KHz, depending on the load. Sure, it is not 1MHz, but I think high voltage, high frequency MOSFETs might be too expensive for just 18W design.
- eugeniub 8y agoAt first I thought this was about the PowerPort PD Atom 1, which isn't yet released, but it's about the PowerPort PD 1, which came out sometime last year.
- lanius 8y agoIs USB-IF certification any guarantee of quality?
- voltagex_ 8y agoI prefer these reviews: https://lygte-info.dk/info/indexUSB%20UK.html https://lygte-info.dk/info/indexUSB%20UK.html (warning, large number of images)
- wkearney99 8y agoIf you want some entertaining tear-downs and analysis, BigCliveDotCom on Youtube is great viewing. https://www.youtube.com/user/bigclivedotcom/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/bigclivedotcom/videos
- wlesieutre 8y agoPage is hanging trying to load a pair of jquery files http://dn-staticfile.qbox.me/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js?ver=1.11.1 http://dn-staticfile.qbox.me/jquery-migrate/1.2.1/jquery-migrate.min.js?ver=1.2.1 and doesn't seem to display images without them. The rest of the page did render eventually though. If anyone else has this issue, right clicking the image and using "View Image" does work, I guess it's relying on jquery to display them on the page or something?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Ambroos 8y agoImages are hidden by default until a script shows them with an animation (fade) once they're loaded. The script is part of the Wordpress theme this site is using. Clearly it's old code considering it's relying on code only compatible with jQuery 1.2.1 which was released in 2007.
- marpstar 8y agoTo be fair, that's jQuery Migrate 1.2, which was released in 2013. Not much better, but still... jQuery 1.11 (the version it's actually using) was released in 2014.
- gumby 8y agoNot sure I could call this "well made" which is a disappointment for me with regards to Anker. The HV and LV sides don't appear to be well, or even at all isolated. I suppose the big yellow-wrapped thing is the voltage transformation stage, but the connector should feed directly into it. Looks like it is actually be a transformer rather than a switching supply, which I suppose could cut costs.
- lykr0n 8y agohttp://cdn2.geekifix.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/21-1024x683.jpeg http://cdn2.geekifix.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/21-1024x... It looks like power comes in right above the FT15SM. I'm seeing great separation between the left and right side. Sure, there isn't' an air-gap, but it looks like good enough. It's compact and potted which makes it hard for either of us to get a really good idea.
- devy 8y agoKeep in mind that what Ben torn down in the article was actually a Chinese version of the charger - the north american version could be different (though I am unsure.)
- zaarn 8y agoIt does seem like the HV and LV are seperated into the daughterboards, which would give them some seperation. The actual seperation you need isn't that big and if you're careful you don't need to divide the PCB into two strict sections (just look at most Multimeter PCBs). I also suspect that like 99% of power supplies, this is a transformer with a switching voltage regulator behind it since PD 2.0 requires a range of voltages to be available.
- theamk 8y agoeh? this is not a 50Hz /60Hz transformer, for two reasons: (1) Low-frequency transformers rated for 18 watts are way bigger than this (2) There is a nice big picture of INN3265C ("Flyback Switcher IC") So there is no way one could connect the connector directly to the transformer.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
- jaytaylor 8y agoHad never heard of "ultrasonic welding" [0]. Also had no idea the wide range of applications, even many shoes use this process for bonding the materials together [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_welding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_welding [1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/ultrasonic-welding.htm/printable https://science.howstuffworks.com/ultrasonic-welding.htm/pri...
- derefr 8y agoAnyone willing to compare and contrast with the iPad Pro's diminutive USB-C charger?
- mark212 8y agothere's a teardown of the Apple 2018 iPad Pro charger (18w) on the same site for comparison. Sadly, there's not much analysis except to say that the Apple charger is very well built and compact.
- AceJohnny2 8y agoLinks: Apple 18W charger (iPad Pro): http://www.chargerlab.com/archives/939.html http://www.chargerlab.com/archives/939.html Apple 61W charger (Macbook Pro): http://www.chargerlab.com/archives/1217.html http://www.chargerlab.com/archives/1217.html Apple 87W charger (Macbook Pro): http://www.chargerlab.com/archives/1292.html http://www.chargerlab.com/archives/1292.html
- sisk 8y agoThe subject of this teardown is the 18w PowerPort charger, not to be confused with the soon-to-ship (?) gallium nitride (GaN) 27w charger known as the PowerPort Atom PD-1[0]. I only know of two shipping GaN chargers at the moment: the 45w RAVPower (RP-PC104)[1], and the 45w Mu One[2]. I imagine we'll see an ton of GaN chargers this year. [0]: https://www.anker.com/deals/powerport_atom https://www.anker.com/deals/powerport_atom [1]: https://www.ravpower.com/p/ravpower-45w-type-c-pd-wall-charger.html https://www.ravpower.com/p/ravpower-45w-type-c-pd-wall-charg... [2]: https://www.themu.co.uk/collections/muone https://www.themu.co.uk/collections/muone
- chx 8y agoThe Inergie 60C must be one as well, it's too small to be anything else. Also, the finsix dart is GaN but it's not USB C.
- sisk 8y agoThanks for the additions. Didn't think of the Dart since it's been around for a while. That has to be one of (the?) first GaN chargers to market?
- ksec 8y agoThanks, That is absolutely brilliant! I wonder why these product don't get much media coverage at all. Turns out Discovery and Distribution aren't really a solved problem at all in the world of Internet. I just wish some of these had two port though. I am starting to wonder if there will be hotels adopting USB-C as Charging standards and provides Port for it.
- anotheryou 8y agoI use this one for 30eur to power my dell xps when watching movies and charge 2-3 phones over night: http://budgetlightforum.com/node/62740 http://budgetlightforum.com/node/62740 it's cheap super portable considering it charges all my devices at once and if you don't need to charge fast on all ports at once it's totally fine. edit: amazon reviews look like you have to get lucky to get one that doesn't blow up... mine works absolutely fine since 6 month though.
- colechristensen 8y agoCharging more slowly increases the longevity of your lithium-type batteries anyway.
- garysahota93 8y agoIs this link working for folks? It wouldn't load for me :(
- frankus 8y agoApologies for being mildly off-topic, but is anyone aware of a USB-C PD charger with more than a single USB-C PD port? Doesn't necessarily have to be wall-wart style.
- ars 8y agohttps://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07JVL8C3H https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07JVL8C3H Anker PA-Y16 It's cheaper to buy two single port ones though :(
- sahaskatta 8y agoThat may charge 2 smart phones just fine, but it isn't enough for a laptop like a Macbook 13 or Dell XPS 13. I'm sure we'll see ones that can handle enough output for a computer + phone in the near future!
- SomeHacker44 8y agoCount me in... I would love a full spec USB-C charger with 100+ watt total output across, say, four or five USB-C ports. Maybe add an A or two for good measure, perhaps with QC. I do carry an Anker with one USB-C and four A for travel with my (USB-C) laptop(s). While I am wishing... A USB-C hub (bus powered or from a PD input) with full speed USB-C ports, maybe 4-6, and an A or two for good measure.
- Marsymars 8y agoMaybe someone who knows electronics better than me can chime in with corrections and/or correct terminology, but my impression is that USB PD doesn't lend itself to having a bunch of type-C ports that draw from a shared max power rating in the way that's common with USB BC devices. e.g. if you have a 100W brick, you're going to have five ports with 20W max, or one 60W port and four 10W ports, etc. (that is, each port is essentially an independent charger sharing a housing, and with the heat limitations of the shared housing)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gpderetta 8y ago0
- joshstrange 8y agoI really wish Anker would ship a charger that can power a MBP 15" 2018. I use Anker for everything charging/battery/cable related except my third party MBP chargers (because they don't make one) and 90 degree cables (again, because they don't make them. If not my boyfriend would slowly destroy every cable I have by resting his phone on his chest while charging...)