A Closer Look at the USB Power Delivery based Nintendo AC Switch Adapter

The Nintendo Switch was released with mainly positive reviews and like other portable devices, can greatly benefit from fast charging. To achieve rapid charging, the Nintendo Switch uses USB Power Delivery technology over its USB Type-C interface. Nintendo also released the USB Power Delivery based Nintendo Switch AC Adapter to keep your Switch charged.

The Nintendo Switch AC Adapter supports 7.5 watts (5 volts @ 1.5 amps) and 39 watts (15 volts @ 2.6 amps) charging profiles over its USB Type-C connector. Because it uses the USB Power Delivery standard, you should be able to use the Nintendo Switch AC Adapter to charge the Nintendo Switch as well as other USB Type-C and Power Delivery enabled devices.

Here's a close look at the Nintendo Switch AC Adapter's packaging and physical appearance.

The Nintendo Switch is the first major game console to use USB Power Delivery technology and will be taking a closer look at how both the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch AC Adapter work with non-Nintendo products.

Using the USB Power Test App from Granite River Labs with the Granite River Labs USB Power Delivery Compliance C2 Tester, we performed the following tests for the Nintendo Switch AC Adapter.

The USB Power Test App first negotiates a power contract for every PDO supported by the Nintendo charger, and increases the load gradually to find the threshold where over current protection (OCP) kicks in and voltage and current start to drop for safety reasons. The charger however does not recover after 5V PDO OCP trigger as seen below.

The USB Power Test App reports out all the PDO's supported by the Nintendo charger and their OCP thresholds.

PDO	OCP (A)
PDO#1 Fixed: 5V 1.5A	1.75
PDO#2 Fixed: 15V 2.6A	0.01

The USB Power Test App from Granite River Labs takes this data to produce an I-V curve which graphically shows the relationship between voltage and current for each PDO.

The USB Power Test App can also use the Granite River Labs USB Power Delivery Compliance C2 Tester integrated with the GW Instek APS-7100 programmable AC power supply to compare the charger's power output vs power input so that power efficiency can be measured and compared to regulatory limits from United States of Energy (DOE) Level VI or European Union's CoC Tier 2 requirements. We can repeat the power efficiency tests for different PDO's, current load conditions, and different AC input ranges, allowing us to get a complete picture of power efficiency ranges across all different usage scenarios.

Using the USB Power Delivery Compliance C2 Tester from Granite River Labs to run just a subset of the full USB Power Delivery compliance test suite, some compliance failures were observed for the Nintendo Switch AC Adapter.

Result Summary

Sl No	Test ID	Test Name	Test Result
1	TDA.2.1.1.1	BMC-PHY-TX-EYE	FAIL
2	TDA.2.1.1.2	BMC-PHY-TX-BIT	PASS
3	TDA.2.1.2.2	BMC-PHY-RX-INT-REJ	PASS
4	TDA.2.1.2.1	BMC-PHY-RX-BUSIDL	FAIL
5	TDA.2.1.3.1	BMC-PHY-TERM	PASS
7	TDA.2.2.1	BMC-PROT-SEQ-GETCAPS	PASS
11	TDA.2.2.7	BMC-PROT-BIST-NOT-5V-SRC	PASS
13	TDA.2.3.1.1	POW-SRC-LOAD-P-PC	PASS
14	TDA.2.3.2.1	POW-SRC-TRANS-P-PC	PASS
15	TDB.2.2.9	BMC-PROT-GSC-REC	FAIL

BMC Eye Diagram

Looking at the load screenshot captured from the GRL-USB-PD C2 Compliance Test Solution App, we can see that the Nintendo Switch AC Adapter  supports different voltage and current levels for charging.