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A Quick Look at Power Support of the Portway 60W USB-C PD and QC4+ Charger

The 60W USB-C PD and QC4+ Charger by Portway Technologies provides two USB Type-C ports which can be used to charge two USB-C devices simultaneously. One of the charger's Type-C ports supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+ (QC4+) technology that enables charging using USB Power Delivery 3.0 based PPS (Programmable Power Supply) and Augmented PDO's. This QC4+ based port offers up to 45W charging for USB Type-C notebook PC's and tablets like Apple's MacBook Pro 2018 and 11-inch iPad Pro (2018). The other Type-C port on the charger can be used to supply up to 15W power to charge most phones such as the Apple iPhone XS Max or Android phones such as Google's Pixel 3 XL and the Samsung Galaxy S9+.  

We used the USB Power Test App from Granite River Labs with the Granite River Labs USB Power Delivery Compliance C2 Tester to generate the following test results for the Portway 60W USB-C PD and QC4+ Charger.

The USB Power Test App first negotiates a power contract for every PDO supported by the Portway 60W USB-C PD and QC4+ 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 USB Power Test App also reports out all the PDO's supported by the Portway charger and their OCP thresholds. OCP thresholds for the Portway charger are set at about 7-65% above the maximum current levels for the fixed PDO's.

PDO	OCP (A)
PDO#1 Fixed: 5V 3A	3.47
PDO#2 Fixed: 9V 3A	4.95
PDO#3 Fixed: 12V 3A	3.59
PDO#4 Fixed: 15V 3A	3.21
PDO#5 Fixed: 20V 3A	3.58
PDO#6 PPS: (3~20)V 3A	5.01

The USB Power Test App takes this data to produce an I-V curve which graphically shows the relationship between voltage and current for each PDO.  Like other chargers that support PPS (Programmable Power Supply), we can observe current fold-back behavior where as the current increases beyond the OCP threshold, the voltage starts to curve down rather than immediately shutting off. The 5th and 6th PDO's show more dramatic fold-back behavior compared to the other PDO's.

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.