This Video Tour Dives Deep Into the Raspberry Pi RP2350’s Silicon Die — By Stripping Off Its Bundle

Pseudonymous YouTuber “electronupdate” has peered deeper than most into the internal workings of Raspberry Pi’s new RP2350 microcontroller — by peeling off its lid and capturing photographs of the silicon the lies beneath.

“Star of the present is the brand new RP2350,” electronupdate writes of their evaluation. “Numerous modifications [over the RP2040], maybe probably the most intriguing is 2 Arm [Cortex-]M33 cores or two RISC-V Hazard3 cores. No query that Arm dominates the embedded processor area, nevertheless there’s a challenger on the sidelines: RISC-V. Reasonably than taking the chance of constructing a RISC-V [product] they cleverly put each on their subsequent die permitting the shopper to modify between architectures if they need. It is a intelligent approach of judging market demand with out exposing an excessive amount of value.”

Whereas Raspberry Pi has shared a lot in regards to the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the dual-architecture RP2350 microcontroller that powers it since the launch earlier this month, the corporate hasn’t gone deep into analyzing precisely what’s inside that sq. black chip bundle — with electronupdate taking over the problem and de-encapsulating a chip, sadly packaged in a solution to make non-destructive die imaging not possible, to investigate what is going on on inside.

“Similar 40nm [process] because the earlier [Raspberry] Pi Pico [RP2040],” electronupdate notes of their evaluation, which was delivered to our consideration by Adafruit, “however the die is sort of a bit bigger. [It’s a] basic little bit of design! The ability provide is a buck-boost from Richtek, Attention-grabbing selection because it permits the meeting to be powered from a voltage as little as 1.8V (battery use, maybe?)”

Different highlights from the evaluation, which was made more difficult by the fascinating elements being lined by an influence distribution community that wanted cautious removing, embody recognizing blocks reused from the unique RP2040 (“the [RP2350] very a lot is an incremental design,” electronupdate surmises), an on-die voltage regulator (“I am not fairly positive why they put a voltage regulator on there,” the YouTuber notes), the 4 analog to digital converters (ADCs), and the on-chip reminiscence.

This latter was put below shut commentary, for one superb motive: the possibility at a money prize. “[Raspberry Pi has] a contest going the place in the event you can learn a secret out of the ROM, I feel, they’ve a bit of prize going,” electronupdate says, referring to a contest launched at DEF CON 32 earlier this month. “A bodily assault is definitely a reasonably profitable method, nevertheless we’ve got to do selective steel delayering which is definitely considerably subtle, however I think you might take the key out that approach.”

The complete tour of the chip is detailed within the video embedded above and on electronupdate’s YouTube channel. Extra data is accessible in a companion weblog submit.