RISC-V developer board with Espressif ESP32-P4
Espressif is producing more and more chips with RISC-V cores. The comparatively powerful ESP32-P4 now comes on a 65-euro board for smart home technology.
The Espressif ESP32-P4-Function-EV-Board with the 32-bit RISC-V processor ESP32-P4
(Image: Espressif)
The Chinese chip manufacturer Espressif is known for its cheap and widely used microcontrollers with integrated WLAN, ESP8266 and ESP32. The new ESP32-P4 is significantly more powerful because it contains two RISC-V cores with up to 400 MHz and an additional particularly economical one with 40 MHz. Espressif is now selling the developer board with the unwieldy name "ESP32-P4-Function-EV-Board" for 65 euros via AliExpress. In addition to the ESP32-P4, it also has a radio module with ESP32-C6, which supports WLAN (2.4 GHz), Bluetooth 5 (with LE) as well as Zigbee, Thread and Matter.
According to Espressif, the ESP32-P4-Function-EV-Board is primarily intended for developers of smart home devices and projects. It can also be connected to the home network via Fast Ethernet and has additional connections for USB 2.0, a display (MIPI DSI), a camera (CSI), a loudspeaker and a GPIO pin header.
Possible areas of application include household appliances, vacuum cleaner robots, door intercom stations or control units for e-bikes and scooters. With its combination of features, the Espressif ESP32-P4-Function-EV board lies between simple ESP32 microcontrollers and more powerful ARM64 single-board computers, which run a 64-bit Linux but also require more power.
RISC-V cores in the ESP32-P4
The two "High Performance" RISC-V cores developed by Espressif itself are significantly more powerful than the previous ESP32 computing cores. Their instruction set also includes extensions for floating-point calculations (FPU), digital signal processing (DSP) and AI - which Espressif has not yet documented in detail.
(Image: Espressif)
However, the 32-bit cores (RV32) do not run "off-the-shelf" RV64GC Linux. There are also only 768 kilobytes of SRAM memory available and 32 megabytes of pseudo-SRAM (PSRAM) integrated in the chip housing. Apparently there is also 768 KByte "L2MEM".
The ESP32P4 has built-in decoders for H.264 video and JPEG as well as a 2D "Pixel Processing Accelerator".
The ESP32-P4 is extensively equipped with input/output interfaces. All common microcontroller interfaces such as I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO, I2S are available as well as SDIO, MIPI CSI for a camera, MIPI DSI for a (supplied) display and Fast Ethernet (100 Mbit/s). There is also USB 2.0 OTG - meaning that the controller works as a USB device and not as a USB host.
In addition to the ESP32-C6 radio module mentioned above, Espressif soldered 16 MByte SPI flash and a MicroSD card reader onto the ESP32-P4-Function-EV board. There is also an I2S sound chip with a 3-watt amplifier, a microphone and a few buttons.
A USB-C socket is located on the board as a programming interface, which is connected to a UART of the ESP32-P4 via the Silicon Labs USBXpress CP2102N USB-to-serial converter.
(ciw)
