The big question is how it performs with high-speed data. Google's Twinkie and this Twonkie clone use a design which messes with the data lines as little as possible so they'll probably still work with USB4 if you're lucky, but the linked ST device is routing those traces all over the board. No issue with USB2, might work with 10Gbps USB3, but anything more? I wouldn't want to bet on it.
Nicer in what way? I've used the one referenced in the first comment (CY4500) and it worked quite well. I'm not entirely sure what could be done better.
Nice to know that cheaper ones exist though - is the supporting SW any good (reading out packets, recording etc)
This isn't quite the same thing, I think. The Cypress one has decent software for reading individual PD packets and debugging PD/TCPM implementations.
Even if you can read out the packets with that, it doesn't look like it has a good pre-existing analysis software for it, which is a large part of the value proposition for the cypress version.
Well, you can't read PD packets at that layer - they are only realistically visible at the driver layer and below, as the TCPM driver will manage the PD negotiation (and the main benefit of these analysers, at least for me, was to help write such a driver in the first place :))
