Many engineers choose standalone UARTs over integrated UARTs because the integrated versions are striped down to reduce chip size, power usage, and cost. This results in sub par performance which makes them inadequate for many applications. Standalone UARTs offer faster baud rates, deeper FIFOs, more channels, automatic hardware data flow control, and many other advanced features. The higher performance, extra features, and flexibility of standalone UARTs give engineers more options and improves total system performance.