Industry Expert Blogs
DisplayPort and USB Type-C (Part 1 of a series)-March 20, 2017 |
DisplayPort became a associated USB when USB Type-C was launched. The Type-C connector provides additional pin/signals/wires to run simultaneous lanes of more data. The additional lanes are called Alternate Mode or “Alt-Mode” for short. It is possible to run both USB on the USB lines and and DisplayPort in Alt Mode.
The physical connector as shown below has both the Tx+/Tx- and Rx+/Rx- wires for the USB 3.1 traffic, and D+/D- for the USB 2.0 traffic. Only one group/set needs to be used for actual traffic. The remaining ones will be use for Alt-Mode.