This is my first attempt at designing with the FT232H and if you’re wondering how the FT232H is different from the standard FT232 or other typical usb serial converters, well it’s different because it has a thing called MPSSE which stands for Multi-Protocol Synchronous Serial Engine. This allows it to emulate a variety of serial protocols like: JTAG, I2C, SPI or general purpose bit-bang. So a couple of years ago I designed this breakout board and almost everything was right except for the fact that I got the usb data lines mixed, which prevented the chip from enumerating correctly on the USB bus.
So this year because I got a couple of FPGA boards I thought why not redesign that board to fix the data line issue and add a couple new features that would make it a very useful tool to have in the lab. And so I started designing this new board which I called VOLTAG and there a couple of things that I absolutely wanted to have: the first one was USB type C, I decided to only use USB Type-C sometime at the end of last year so every new board needs to be on USB type C, if it has a USB connection at all and the second thing I wanted to have was the ability to level shift the JTAG signals.