-Lexman™ Posted February 3, 2021 Posted February 3, 2021 Available for an MSRP of just $4, the Pico is powered by Raspberry Pi’s own custom silicon, the RP2040 SoC, which features an Arm Cortex M0+ processor running at up to 133 Hz, with 264K of SRAM and 2MB of onboard storage. A great choice for robots, weather stations or other electronics projects, the board doesn’t run a full operating system, but instead launches programs you write in either MicroPython or C on a host computer (that could be a PC, a Mac or a regular Pi) and upload to it. Perhaps even more important than the Pico itself is Raspberry Pi Foundation’s first foray into making its own silicon. We wanted to learn more about the RP2040 so we asked James Adams, Chief Operating Officer at Raspberry Pi Trading to tell us how “Pi Silicon” was created. “We couldn’t see a way to offer something differentiated in the microcontroller space using existing third-party silicon, so we set out to build our own,” Adams said. “The RP2040 chip has been a long time in the making - we started initial work at the back end of 2016, we had some test silicon in our hands in September 2018 which we then reworked into the final device we use on the Raspberry Pi Pico board. The device has evolved substantially since those early days. We learned a lot from our first test silicon and I think, although it has taken a while, what we've ended up with is very exciting (in terms the architecture and performance per $) - it's a superb bit of engineering. The RP2040 chips are fabricated at TSMC on their 40nm process.” RECOMMENDED VIDEOS FOR YOU... video playing The Tom's Hardware Show (May 28): Raspberry Pi 8GB, Intel Code... 29/05/20 The Tom's Hardware Show (May 21, 2020): Comet Lake-S Tested,... 22/05/20 The Tom's Hardware Show: AMD vs Intel, Arrowless Keyboards, Pi... 08/05/20 The Tom's Hardware Show: New Intel Chips, Pi Camera and High... 01/05/20 Raspberry Pi 4 Reviewed: The New Gold Standard for Single-Board... 24/06/19 Adams outlined some of the advantages of the custom silicon. “We are offering some really unique features with the RP2040 chip - a dual core device (I’m not aware of other dual core microcontrollers at this price point) coupled to a high-performance bus matrix, meaning you can get full performance on both cores concurrently, and plenty of high-bandwidth RAM,” he said. As well as the usual fixed peripherals (UARTs, I2C, SPI etc.) we also have a special bit of hardware called the PIO (Programmable I/O) unit, which is basically a very small, specialised, programmable state machine that can do high-speed, cycle accurate “bit banging” of I/O – this block can be used to offload many kinds of timing-critical pin-waggling tasks from the CPU(s) – we’ve had it emulating interfaces such as SD card, VGA and driving WS2812B LEDs. We’ve also added other goodies like optimised floating-point libraries to the boot ROM, and a USB core which can be used in either master or slave mode.” Could the Raspberry Pi Pico be the start of a new range of boards based upon the RP2040? Adams said the Foundation is waiting to see how things go with the first board.
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