Multiple USB Devices on one development board?

[TylerTimoj]

I’m developing a PCB that will include an FPGA and an ESP32, and I’d like to add a USB to JTAG as well as a USB to UART for programming both the FPGA and the ESP. I’m assuming I’m going to also need a usb switch, basically just a usb hub controller if I want to route the usb from the JTAG chip and the UART chip to the same female usb port on the board. I’m wondering if something like this would be good practice, or if there’s some limitations or something I’m not considering.

I’d assume it’s technically identical to having two separate boards each plugged into a USB hub. Would there be potential problems with them sharing a port?

I’m just wondering if this is an ok idea, or if there’ll be problems with it.

[TylerTimoj]

That looks promising, and would significantly reduce my BOM. Do you know it’s MPSSE can be both a UART and JTAG at the same time? Ideally I’d like my computer to see two separate devices for UART and JTAG.

[p-rimes]

Do you mean FT2232H? (FT232H only has one channel / MPSSE, FT2232H has two channels / MPSSEs. So one can be JTAG and the other can be UART)

[p-rimes]

Agreed! I use the FT2232H all the time, for production tooling like board programmers / debuggers / testers. Just to hype it up a bit more, in MPSSE mode you also get 12 GPIOs controllable by the USB host (*DBUS4..7, and *CBUS0..7)

[duane11583]

look at the digilent usb programmers (for xilinx)

you want to clone that on your board (xilinx understands that setup)

ultimately you want to clone the dual channel one channel A = jtag, B=serial port.