Embedded {hardware} specialist tinyVision.ai has launched the follow-up to its pico-ice improvement board, the pico2-ice — now pairing a Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller with a Lattice Semiconductor UltraPlus iCE40UP5K FPGA.
“That is the successor board for the pico-ice, a Raspberry Pi and FPGA coach board,” tinyVision.ai writes of its second-generation improvement board. “The pico-ice is utilized by a number of universities and faculties within the US, EU and South America as an FPGA academic board in addition to in trade as a generic quick prototyping platform. This microcontroller prototyping board provide a sensible platform for exploring digital design, microcontroller purposes, {hardware} description languages (HDLs), and the core features of FPGAs (Subject-Programmable Gate Arrays).”
The pico-ice is again, now with a Raspberry Pi RP2350B on-board — and it is known as, unsurprisingly, the pico2-ice. (📷: tinyVision.aI)
The unique pico-ice was launched again in Might 2023 as an inexpensive improvement board pairing Raspberry Pi’s dual-core RP2040 microcontroller with a Lattice UltraPlus iCE40UP5K FPGA. The brand new mannequin retains the iCE40UP5K FPGA, however swaps out the RP2040 for its successor the RP2350B — a extra highly effective microcontroller with two Arm Cortex-M33 cores alongside two free and open-source RISC-V Hazard3 cores, any two of which will be enabled for simultaneous use. There are 5.3k look-up tables (LUTs) out there on the FPGA alongside 129kb DPRAM, 1Mb SPRAM, and 8MB of low-power quad-SPI exterior SRAM plus 4MB of SPI flash.
The overall-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins for each the FPGA and the microcontroller are introduced out to 0.1″-spaced pin headers, present in twin rows on the lengthy sides of the board, each the FPGA and the RP2350 have their very own user-programmable RGB LED and user-addressable button, and the RP2350B’s Excessive-Pace Transmission (HSTX) peripheral is introduced out to a 22-pin connector. There’s additionally room for 4 PMOD connectors, two of that are devoted to the FPGA, one among which is devoted to the RP2350, and one among which is shared between the 2.
The pico2-ice is out there to order direct from tinyVision.ai at $49.99 with out PMOD connectors or $53.99 with the connectors pre-soldered. Board design recordsdata can be found on GitHub beneath the permissive MIT license.
