QWERTY Embedded Design Launches a PMOD to Put a Raspberry Pi RP2040 on Your FPGA Board
Compatible with any FPGA board boasting a PMOD header, this $20 add-on board includes two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores and a programmable IO block.
QWERTY Embedded Design has announced a simple add-on for the FPGA developer looking to put a couple of low-power Arm Cortex-M0+ cores and programmable input/output (PIO) capabilities into their projects: the RP2040-PMOD, which packs a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller on a PMOD board.
"This item is a simple RP2040 MCU [Microcontroller Unit]-based [with a] twelve-pin connector that was built to allow FPGA users to have a flexible communication device for debug and IO [Input/Output] expansion," the company explains of the compact board. "It can provide UART, SPI, USB, analog or GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] interfaces to an FPGA."
The PMOD standard was developed to make it easy to build expansion hardware for FPGA development boards. In this case, it serves to host the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller — giving it a pair of Arm Cortex-M0+ cores running at a stock 133MHz and 264kB of static RAM, plus a smart programmable input/output (PIO) block capable of running state machines independently of the two processor cores.
While compatible with any FPGA development board which can accept PMOD add-ons, QWERTY recommends the device as an accessory for its own ICE-V Wireless, launched last year as a low-cost open-hardware board combining an Espressif ESP32-C3 RISC-V system-on-chip with a Lattice Semi iCE40 UltraPlus FPGA — and including, of course, a number of PMOD headers.
The RP2040-PMOD is now funding on GroupGets, priced at $20 plus shipping per board; the campaign is due to close on December 17th with hardware to ship 42 days after. Design files for the board are available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.