The Qomu Is an MCU + eFPGA Development Kit That Fits Inside a USB Port
This small form factor board features an EOS S3 low-power MCU with an embedded FPGA supported by 100% open source tools.
When you think of an MCU, you always imagine a large PCB with a chip on it and other components. But the Tomu family has come up with yet another tiny compact board that can simply fit inside your USB port. The latest device of Tomu devices is the Qomu for low-power machine learning-capable IoT devices. Qomu is a complete SoC with an MCU and FPGA and 100% vendor-supported open source tools, even the FPGA tools.
The board is based on a QuickLogic EOS S3 SoC multicore MCU + eFPGA SoC and compatible with Zephyr, FreeRTOS, nMigen, SymbiFlow, and Renode. The SoC integrates an Arm Cortex-M4F MCU that can be clocked up to 80 MHz and embedded FPGA. The eFPGA has 2,400 effective logic cells and 64 Kbits of embedded RAM available.
The small form factor board gets 16Mbit flash along with four capacitive touchpads and three LEDs (RGB). The SoC also has two dedicated multipliers that can be used to offload math-intensive functions, making it the perfect EOS S3 dev kit to get started.
Additionally, a 16-channel DMA for efficient data movement within the SoC and configurable serial peripheral interface (controller and peripheral) along with I2C controller interfaces.
Even if you are not a Verilog expert, don't worry, as Qomu will now support nMigen for a Python-to-FPGA design flow. Moreover, both Zephyr and FreeRTOS real-time embedded operating systems support Qomu, and full device simulation is available with Renode.
The project is looking for community funding and is currently in pre-launch stage on Crowd Supply. If you are interested, you can sign up and get notified when Qomu launches.