Raspberry Pi RP2040 Dual-Core Microcontroller
Product Description
This is the Raspberry Pi RP2040 Dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ Microcontroller IC. Raspberry Pi's 1st MCU, was designed and produced from the ground up by Raspberry Pi Engineers. It is being launched on the Raspberry Pi Pico in January 2021. And now, it's available for everyone to make their own product!
Well, this explained it all:
What is Raspberry Pi RP2040?
Well, RP2040 is a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller silicon with a flexible clock up to 133MHz. A microcontroller is a brain for development boards such as Arduino UNO, yet RP2040 offers way more powerful features! A microcontroller is the main IC that allows you to program for physical computing projects where it controls anything from small electronic components, LEDs, motors; reading information from sensors, or communicating with other microcontrollers.
We probably have lots of microcontrollers in our house already. For example, a washing machine is controlled by a microcontroller; most likely our watch is too; there is also one in a microwave. And one of the closest examples to a digital maker might be the 3D printer. The controller board has a microcontroller on it. Of course, all these microcontrollers already have their programs for the applications.
Dual-Core ARM Cortex M0+
It comes with not one, but two cores (dual-core) of a 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ processor. A flexible clocking system, with configurable up to a maximum speed of 133MHz! This tiny MCU comes with a whopping 264 Kbyte of SRAM, built-in. And offers an option for designers to match external Quad-SPI Flash of up to 16 MByte, and Execute in Place (XIP). Large RAM and Flash size enable you to utilize high-level programming languages like MicroPython for this microcontroller.
USB 1.1 PHY (Host and Device Ready)
RP2040 contains a USB 2.0 controller that can operate as either:
A Full-Speed device (12 Mbit/s)
A host that can communicate with both Low Speed (1.5 Mbit/s) and Full-Speed devices. This includes multiple downstream devices connected to a USB hub.
RP2040 comes with an integrated USB 1.1 PHY which interfaces the USB 2.0 controller with the DP and DM pins of the chip. With this, the RP2040 has provided ease of interface to computers. This has been widely used on Raspberry Pi Pico, just download the UF2 file, drag and drop in the drive (Mass Storage), and you can program the RP2040 with MicroPython or CircuitPython, no additional programmer is needed. Neat!
Peripheral Rich MCU
Block Diagram of RP2040
With 30 GPIO (4 reserves for QSPI with External Flash), there are plenty of peripherals for many different applications. Among these 26 GPIOs, there are:
5 x 12-bit ADC with 500ksps (kilo sample per second)
4 x ADC extended to GPIO
1 x ADC tied to an internal temperature sensor
2 x UART
2 x SPI
2 x I2C
16 x PWM pin
Internally, it also comes with 1 x Timer with 4 alarms and 1 x Real Time Counter
2 x High-Speed Programmable IO (PIO) blocks that are flexible and user-programmable. It can emulate interfaces such as the SD card interface or VGA.
With on-chip 264 KByte of SRAM and external QSPI Flash up to 16 MByte, Raspberry Pi RP2040 will never prompt you about not having enough memory :) Besides, the large size of RAM and Flash also enables applications to be supported with higher programming languages such as MicroPython, CircuitPython, or even Javascript.
Check out this video about PIO from the Raspberry Pi team
Product Resources
Raspberry Pi RP2040 vs STM32F1 vs SAMD21G18 vs ESP32-S2
Please note: Locally Stocked. Available for Immediate Shipping!