WCH (Jiangsu Qin Heng) Components

WCH is a legitimate, publicly-listed Chinese semiconductor company (stock code 688262 on the STAR Market) with over 1,000 employees, its own R&D centers in Nanjing and Shanghai, and authorized distribution agreements worldwide. The CH340 is an original WCH design, not a clone of FTDI or Silicon Labs. It is the most-deployed USB-UART bridge in Asia, appearing on hundreds of millions of development boards.

CH340G is the classic SOP-16 variant requiring an external 12 MHz crystal. CH340C integrates the oscillator on-die, eliminating the crystal and reducing the external BOM by one component. Electrically and protocol-wise they are identical; CH340C is the right choice for new designs.

Windows 10 build 1803 and later includes a generic CH340 driver via Windows Update, so most modern systems work out of the box. On older Windows builds or locked-down enterprise machines, you may need to manually install WCH's signed driver from wch.cn/downloads. On macOS 10.13+ and Linux (kernel 3.x+), native drivers are included.

WCH authorized channel ships in 3-5 days for most interface ICs, which is significantly faster than Western vendors. Our Shenzhen warehouse holds stock of CH340G and CH340C for same-day to 1-day shipment.