tinyVision.ai Launches Its Next-Gen pico2-ice FPGA Dev Board, Now Featuring a Raspberry Pi RP2350B
New board keeps the Lattice iCE40UP5K but swaps out the original's RP2040 for the more powerful RP2350B.
Embedded hardware specialist tinyVision.ai has launched the follow-up to its pico-ice development board, the pico2-ice — now pairing a Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller with a Lattice Semiconductor UltraPlus iCE40UP5K FPGA.
"This is the successor board for the pico-ice, a Raspberry Pi and FPGA trainer board," tinyVision.ai writes of its second-generation development board. "The pico-ice is used by several universities and colleges in the US, EU and South America as an FPGA educational board as well as in industry as a generic fast prototyping platform. This microcontroller prototyping board offer a practical platform for exploring digital design, microcontroller applications, hardware description languages (HDLs), and the core functions of FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays)."
The original pico-ice was launched back in May 2023 as an affordable development board pairing Raspberry Pi's dual-core RP2040 microcontroller with a Lattice UltraPlus iCE40UP5K FPGA. The new model keeps the iCE40UP5K FPGA, but swaps out the RP2040 for its successor the RP2350B — a more powerful microcontroller with two Arm Cortex-M33 cores alongside two free and open-source RISC-V Hazard3 cores, any two of which can be enabled for simultaneous use. There are 5.3k look-up tables (LUTs) available on the FPGA alongside 129kb DPRAM, 1Mb SPRAM, and 8MB of low-power quad-SPI external SRAM plus 4MB of SPI flash.
The general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins for both the FPGA and the microcontroller are brought out to 0.1"-spaced pin headers, found in dual rows on the long sides of the board, both the FPGA and the RP2350 have their own user-programmable RGB LED and user-addressable button, and the RP2350B's High-Speed Transmission (HSTX) peripheral is brought out to a 22-pin connector. There's also room for four PMOD connectors, two of which are dedicated to the FPGA, one of which is dedicated to the RP2350, and one of which is shared between the two.
The pico2-ice is available to order direct from tinyVision.ai at $49.99 without PMOD connectors or $53.99 with the connectors pre-soldered. Board design files are available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.