Vectino Packs Massive Power Into a Tiny Dev Board

For your average personal project, just about any microcontroller development board will do the job. Driving a small display, a few sensors, and maybe a motor isn’t a big ask for even lower-end chips these days. But eventually, every hardware hacker will need to build something that is both physically small and very computationally demanding. In these cases, the development board must be selected with care to ensure it can get the job done.

For more demanding applications, a new board called the Vectino is worth a look. It is equipped with the best-performing chip in the Arm Cortex-M family, and it also supports Helium (MVE) vector acceleration. This makes Vectino especially well-suited for handling machine learning and digital signal processing tasks on the edge.

The board is designed around an Arm Cortex-M85 microcontroller running at up to 480 MHz. While that clock speed is impressive on its own, the inclusion of Arm's Helium technology may be even more important. It adds SIMD-style vector processing capabilities to the Cortex-M architecture, allowing a single instruction to operate on multiple pieces of data simultaneously. This can provide performance improvements of up to 15x in machine learning and DSP workloads compared to conventional Cortex-M implementations.

The rest of the specs are in line with this high-end microcontroller. Vectino includes 2 MB of flash memory, 1 MB of SRAM, and 128 KB of tightly coupled memory with ECC protection. Floating-point operations are supported in half-, single-, and double-precision formats, and the vector engine can accelerate both integer and floating-point calculations. This makes the board capable of handling complex sensor processing, audio analysis, computer vision preprocessing, and neural network inference without requiring a more power-hungry application processor.

The board also includes an extensive collection of industrial and automotive-oriented interfaces, including CAN-FD, LIN, RS-485, I2C, I3C, SPI, USB 2.0 High Speed, and UART connections capable of operating at up to 60 Mbps. A built-in CAN-FD transceiver and RS-485 transceiver reduce the amount of external hardware required for many projects.

Analog and control applications are well supported with dual 12-bit ADCs, dual 12-bit DACs, high-speed comparators, and numerous timer peripherals. This makes the board suitable for motor control, data acquisition, and real-time automation systems. Support for three-phase PWM generation and Hall sensor tachometer inputs should be particularly attractive to developers working with BLDC motors and robotics projects.

Although the board is powerful enough for professional-grade applications, it has not abandoned the hobbyist community. Vectino offers Arduino-style development while exposing more advanced features through the Renesas Flexible Software Package. The developers also plan to release the hardware design files, drivers, and firmware under the CERN Open Hardware License, making the platform fully open source.

If you could use a board like the Vectino in your toolkit, be sure to sign up for notifications over at Crowd Supply so you can be one of the first to snag your own.