Hi Erik,

In point of fact, I use Silabs USB-UART chips and they work quite well, even for programming my processors. The trick is in the driver. In order to program my processors I need the virtual COM port driver loaded. Then I just select the COM port number as normal. But when the software on my computer needs to interact over the bridge chip I need the API driver loaded (USBExpress for Silabs). And I select the driver I want loaded by setting the PID accordingly. If the PID is EA60h the OS loads the API driver. If the PID is set to EA61h the OS loads the virtual COM port driver.

I tried the FTDI chip back when they first came out. Assembling that little CP2102 chip was quite the challenge, whereas the FTDI chip was a snap. Unfortunately, I found it to be too hit-and-miss to get the FTDI clock to start running. I'm certain that I could've resolved the issue with enough effort, and in fact I believe FTDI has already taken corrective measures in that regard. But at the time it was easier to improve my assembling capabilities and so today I still use the CP2102.