Raspberry Pico 2 boardet er nu introduceret

Raspberry Pico 2 microcontroller-boardet, der inkluderer den nyudviklede RP2350 microcontroller med mange nye og forbedrede features, er nu officielt introduceret. Pico 2 er prissat til kun fem dollars.

Raspberry Pi has just introduced Pico 2, the second-generation microcontroller board, built on RP2350: a new high-performance, secure microcontroller designed internally at Raspberry Pi.

With a higher core clock speed, twice the memory, more powerful Arm cores, new security features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature uplift, while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Pico series. Pico 2 is on sale now, priced at only $5.

Back in January 2021 Rasberry Pi surprised everyone with the launch of the original Pico and the RP2040 microcontroller. The company has since sold nearly four million units of Pico and its wireless-enabled sibling Pico W. RP2040 itself has found a home in countless third-party development boards, and in OEM products from pinball tables to synthesizers.

- While RP2040 has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, we always knew we could do better. There were features on our own list that didn’t make the cut first time round: on-chip storage; lower-power idle states; package options. And there were new features requested by the army of RP2040 users: faster cores; more RAM; code protection, explains founder Eben Upton.

So, two years ago, with the RP1 I/O controller for Raspberry Pi 5 in the bag, the Raspberry Pi chip team started work on what would become RP2350. This is a vastly more sophisticated design than RP2040, featuring:

- Two 150MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores, with floating point and DSP support

- 520KB of on-chip SRAM in ten concurrently accessible banks

A comprehensive security architecture, built around Arm TrustZone for Cortex-M, and including:

- Signed boot support

- 8KB of on-chip antifuse one-time-programmable (OTP) memory

, SHA-256 acceleration

- A hardware true random number generator (TRNG)

- An on-chip switch-mode power supply and low-quiescent-current LDO

- Twelve upgraded PIO state machines

- A new HSTX peripheral for high-speed data transmission

- Support for external QSPI PSRAM

Where RP2040 provides only a single 7×7mm, QFN56 package option, this time Raspberry Pi is offering a choice: a 7×7mm, QFN60 package (RP2350A) with 30 GPIOs, or a 10×10mm, QFN80 package (RP2350B) with 48 GPIOs; and variants of each with 2MB of stacked-in-package QSPI flash (RP2354A and RP2354B).

- Although our silicon die now measures an extravagant 5.3mm2, versus 2.7mm2 for RP2040, RP2350A will be just ten cents more expensive, costing $0.80 in 3,400-unit reels, or $1.10 in single-unit quantities. RP2350B will cost ten cents more than RP2350A, while the RP2354 variants will cost just twenty cents more than their flashless brethren, explains Eben Upton.

RP2350 will be generally available in volume before the end of 2024. 

While there is relatively little stock in saleschannels today, Pico 2 is in full-rate production with their partner Sony. Many of the Approved Reseller partners are operating backorder and reservation schemes, and we will be shipping units to them on a regular basis over the next few weeks.

Before the end of the year, Raspberry PI expect to ship a wireless-enabled Pico 2 W, using the same Infineon 43439 modem as Pico W, and versions of both Pico 2 and Pico 2 W with pre-installed 0.1-inch headers.