QuickLogic's Tiny Qomu FPGA and MCU Dev Board, Designed with Sean Cross, Hits Crowd Supply

QuickLogic has officially opened crowdfunding for its ultra-compact Qomu microcontroller and field programmable gate array (FPGA) development platform, ahead of shipping the first hardware to users in May this year.

First teased by the company late last year, the Qomu marks the latest entry in the *omu family of ultra-compact development hardware which launched three years ago with Tim Ansell's Tomu. Like its predecessors, the Qomu is designed to fit almost completely within a USB port with only a tiny portion protruding to aid removal — and like its predecessors the Qomu packs a surprising amount of hardware.

"It’s not just an MCU, it’s not just an FPGA — it’s a complete SoC that fits inside a USB port," QuickLogic explains of the diminutive board. "Qomu is differentiated by its vendor-supported open source tooling — even the FPGA tools. The Qomu dev kit is the most capable tiny USB device, featuring QuickLogic’s EOS S3 multicore MCU + eFPGA SoC and its suite of 100% open source tools, including Zephyr, FreeRTOS, nMigen, SymbiFlow, and Renode."

The heart of the Qomu is QuickLogic's EOS S3 system-on-chip, which includes an Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller core running at up to 80MHz and with 512kB of system memory with an FPGA boasting 2,400 effective logic cells, 64kB of RAM, and eight RAM/FIFO controllers. The SoC also includes the company's "Flexible Fusion Engine," operating at up to 10MHz and with 50kB of control and 16kB of data memory, designed to offer a digital signal processor (DSP)-like architecture for always-on sensor fusion algorithms alongside a Sensor Manager core which operates entirely autonomously and communicates with external sensors over I2C or SPI.

In addition to the core SoC functions, the Qomu offers an external 16Mb flash memory chip, a user-programmable RGB LED, and four touch-sensitive inputs on the protruding portion of the PCB. An injection-moulded case is also included, while the entire project — from the PCB to the bootloader and the bundled case — is open source.

"The Qomu dev kit is a milestone for the industry in many ways. It packs an incredible amount of functionality in the size of a USB port," claims Mao Wang, senior director of marketing at QuickLogic, of the Qomu. "More importantly, this open source dev kit was designed in close collaboration with one of the most respected designers in the open source community, Sean Cross."

Crowdfunding for the Qomu has begun on Crowd Supply ahead of a May 2021 fulfilment date, with the board available at $40 plus shipping.