Milk-V Wants to Power Your Next Project with the RISC-V and Arm Duo Module 01 and Evaluation Board

RISC-V pioneer Milk-V has announced the Duo Module 01, a compact system-on-module that includes a SOPHGO SG2000 system-on-chip with neural network co-processor, on-board RAM, eMMC storage, and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity — with an open source carrier board to turn it into a single-board computer.

"The Duo Module 01 is a compact module with integrated SG2000, WI-FI6/BTDM5.4, and eMMC," Milk-V writes of the latest in a stream of hardware launches built around the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. "It supports SMD [Surface Mount Device] mounting. Also it can greatly save product development time. It is the first choice for making products."

The name of the Duo Module 01 offers a clue as to its origin: it's designed as a system-on-module equivalent to the earlier Milk-V Duo, a breadboard-friendly gumstick-style single-board computer built atop Sophgo's CV1800B system-on-chip. The module variant, however, offers an upgrade to the SG2000, matching the later Milk-V Duo S — giving it both a T-Head XuanTie C906 core running at 1GHz and an Arm Cortex-A53 core running at the same speed, plus a second C906 core running at 700MHz for an embedded real-time operating system, an Intel 8051-compatible microcontroller core, and a neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor delivering a claimed 0.5 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at INT8 precision.

Elsewhere on the module is 512MB of RAM, 8GB of emmC storage, and a radio offering Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity — the latter also supporting Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) operation. There's an image signal processor (ISP) good to five megapixels at 30 frames per second (FPS), a four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface that can be split into two two-lane interfaces, hardware H.264/H.265 codecs, a two-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface, stereo audio in and out, a Fast Ethernet PHY, a single USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) lane, and general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity including up to four I2C, four SPI, and four UART buses, up to 12 pulse-width modulation (PWM) pins, three analog to digital converter (ADC) inputs, one I2S bus, and one JTAG bus, along with SDIO 3.0 connectivity.

While Milk-V is, naturally, making much about the potential for building your own designs powered by the Duo Module 01, it's also offering a quick-start evaluation board — released as open hardware under an unspecified license, to act as both a single-board computer for development and a reference design for those building their own carriers for the module.

More information is available on the Milk-V website; the module and carrier board are available to buy as a bundle on Arace for $34.90; listings have been added for module-only packages, including models without the on-board radio and eMMC storage, but these were listed as out of stock at the time of writing.