Cornell University ECE4760
RP2040

Introduction

The RP2040 is a dual-core Cortex M0 produced by Raspberry Pi. It is attractive for this course because it is programmed bare-metal, supports C, inline ssembler, and MicroPython, and has an interesting set of hardware co-processors. In addition to the two M0 cores, and the usual peripheral hardware devices (ADC, UART, I2C, SPI, USB, PWM, timer), there are several heavy-weight hardware state-machine co-processors. These include:

• an extensive DMA system, 12 channels, 32-bits/clock cycle (register programmed)
• very high-speed, 8-way parallel, programmable, i/o processor (custom assembly language programmed)
• a set of 4-way parallel, interpolator pipelines with adders, shifters, and a variety of feedback (register programmed)
• two integer dividers (one per core, transport triggered)
• intercore communication hardware of 32 bit x 8 word FIFOs and 32 simple spinlocks

For more information:

• RP2040 chip datasheet
• RP2040 PICO board datasheet
• PICO C SDK and Setting up for C (Hunter 2/14/2021)
• Micropython SDK
• PICO code examples

There are currently at least four programming environments ported to the RP2040. C, Micropython, and MBED will be discussed separately.
There is also a port of Circuit python, Lua, and probably other systems.

Copyright Cornell University June 2021