I hope it's ok if I resurrect this topic. I'm currently in the process of designing with this very IC (enthusiast-level, not professional) and noticed the difficulty of hooking this one up as well.
While googling I noticed I'm not the first person to experience this. So I decided to chime in in case someone else has the same question (or if OP still has it).
Disclaimer: I'm just a hobbyist and might very well be missing something here.
I might however be able to shed some light on why someone would use this charger instead of the other ones made by TI. As far as I know (I'm still in the process of checking out the other
chargers) this is the only TI charger that supports powering VBUS (USB) from the battery. The other chargers use VBUS as power input, not output.
e.g. as taken from the BQ25890 datasheet (p6): "VBUS: Charger Input Voltage."
A direct extract from the BQ25703 (or BQ25713) datasheet (p5):
"In the absence of an input source, the bq25703A supports On-the-Go (OTG) function from 1- to 4-cell battery to
generate 4.48 V to 20.8 V on VBUS. During OTG mode, the charger regulates output voltage and output current."
At the same time, this IC also manages the power path to prioritize the output voltage (SYS) over VBUS. This is an important thing to consider and it's basically why someone would use this
IC over a simpler charger with a separate boost converter. I know it would be possible to do this in a discrete solution, but I personally don't know if it would be smaller/easier/cheaper to do.
A related question was actually posted on the TI E2E forum (
http://e2e.ti.com/support/power-management/f/196/t/717133), which might help as well.
Since I myself am still looking to improve my design (and knowledge) as well, it would be helpful if anyone else could correct me or provide some more details into an alternate solution.