Hybrid RISC-V and FPGA SBC for IoT and AI plus embedded control applications

Mouser now stocks the BeagleV-Fire SBC from BeagleBoard.org. This groundbreaking Linux-compatible, open-source SBC provides a performance-robust RISC-V ISA and FPGA customisation and packs a comprehensive array of connectivity options and versatile I/O interfaces – all in a compact form factor at a very affordable price.

The SBC is driven by Microchip Technology's PolarFire MPFS025T FPGA SoC that combines the power and speed of five RISC-V 64-bit cores (four 64-bit RV64GC application cores and one 64-bit RV64IMAC monitor/boot core) with the flexibility of an FPGA. The SoC chipset touts a notable performance score of 3.125 CoreMarks/MHz and 1.714 DMIPS/MHz, and the FPGA fabric on-chip features 23K logic elements, 68 Math blocks (18×18 MACC), and 4 SerDes lanes of 12.7 Gbps (A SYZYGY connector on the board is targeted at high-speed FPGA connections). The SoC also has 128 kB of eNVM and 65 kB of sNVM flash memory. Other on-chip features include a 36-bit DDR4/DDR3/LPDDR4/LPDDR3 memory controller with single-error correction and double-error detection (SECDED) and a healthy offering of communication interfaces (GigE MACs, USB 2.0 OTG, UARTs, SPIs, I2Cs, CAN 2.0, PCIe, etc.).

The SBC provides ample storage with 16GB of Kingston eMMC, 2GB of LPDDR4 RAM and a microSD card socket. Other on-board features include a 1Gb Ethernet connection along with power input via its dual-role USB Type-C (480Mbps) connector and terminal block, an M.2 E-Key PCIe connector for support of 2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi modules, SDIO, a 6-pin, 3.3V UART, a 22-pin CSI camera connector, serial debug ports and JTAG support. The board's BeagleBone compatible 92-pin, P8 and P9 cape header pins supply additional add-on expansion and offer digital I/O pins, PWM, analog, I2C, SPI and UART interfaces.

The compact 86.38mm × 54.61mm × 18.8mm SBC is available now . With powerful computing capabilities and FPGA customisation options, the SBC is Linux-compatible (with Ubuntu preinstalled) design is ideally suited for IoT applications, robotics, artificial intelligence, and embedded systems.