The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

#648 – The RP1 and beyond with the Raspberry Pi Hardware team

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Welcome back James Adams and Liam Fraser

  • The RP1 is the new custom silicon on the Raspberry Pi 5 that is the helper chip to the Broadcom part onboard
  • The HW team was last on the show in 2021 talking about the RP2040
  • They have been working on the RP1 since 2015
  • It’s a small team, especially compared to other companies doing custom silicon.
  • RP2040 update
  • Scripting to reconfigure the silicon clocks/blocks
  • Are they making other chips?
  • Divvy-ing up duties for silicon
  • Broadcom is making the processor and took input for this latest
  • Dialog/Renesas do the power chip on the RPi5
  • PIO
  • Chris gave an example of a board (the Ostentus) where the PIO is just listening for i2c messages and passing them up the stack.
  • Design goal was to do cycle by cycle processing
  • Someone on twitter having PIO talking to fiber transceivers
  • Sourcing and RP2040 availability
  • They get 20000 chips per wafer
  • Buying wafers a few at a time through IMEC, sometimes through TSMC directly
  • There are often small amounts of availability of “wafer starts”
  • TSMC40
  • IP block updates: USB 3 / Ethernet
  • Can do diffs on the verilog
  • Receiving high paid IP
  • Liam is the sysadmin / servers are on site
  • Buying from Synopsis
  • Stitching together IP
  • They list what version of the IP they’re using in the various sections of the datasheet.
  • Prototyping on FPGAs
  • Controller and Phy interface are exposed
  • ProFPGA system with daughtercards
  • Can’t run at full clock speed on FPGA
  • Digital vs analog simulation
  • Could someone (competitors) copy things?
  • As open as possible, being open where it provides value
  • Cost savings on the RP2040
  • Traditionally the “Southbridge” is the IO hub for computing, the Northbridge was the cache/memory (later subsumed into large CPUs)
  • 2712 on RPi is 16 nm
  • This model of creating different generations of silicon but putting them all together is similar to chiplets but…on a PCB
  • There is a (hidden-ish) PIO in the RP1.
  • There will be more processing delays in RPI5 to deal with, but they won’t be noticable because Linux is already pretty not-real-time
  • Hoovering up more functions in one chip
  • Layout of connectors changed again
  • Pins are created to be well laid out on the PCB
  • RISC V foundation
  • The stack / ecosystem isnt as mature
  • James’ signature is under the USB3 connector
  • RPi5 is “the most raspberry pi raspberry pi” yet
    • ...more
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    The Amp Hour Electronics PodcastBy The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)
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