Eye on NPI - BeagleBoard.org BeagleV-Fire® Featuring Microchip PolarFire @digikey @beagleboardorg
31This week's EYE ON NPI is so hot, yet so cool: it's the BeagleV-Fire from BeagleBoard.org (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/b/beagleboard/beaglev-fire) featuring the Microchip PolarFire MPFS025T-FCVG484E (https://www.digikey.com/short/ddw7fmww), a powerful Processor+FPGA combo SoC that has 4x 64-bit RV64GC Application cores, as well as a 23K logic element FPGA. The BeagleV-Fire outfits this chip with a tidy number of wired up peripherals so that you can quickly get started with complex computational requirements without having to spin up a custom PCB.
Historically, the BeagleBoard folks have used ARM-core chips: their famous BeagleBone Black (https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglebone-black) contained a TI-built ARM Cortex A8. But recently they've been experimenting more with RISC-V.
RISC-V is an 'Open ISA' - which means that you get a well defined, high speed core, that adheres the the RISC-V ISA Specifications (https://riscv.org/technical/specifications/) and use implementations thereof, without having to pay ARM a licensing fee. And recently ARM has looked to raise those fees (https://www.xda-developers.com/arm-increasing-royalty-fees/) - which has a lot more chip makers looking seriously at RISC-V as an alternative core. Now, to be honest, RISC-V is not as mature as ARM, and you're not going to have as much language and peripheral support for it. But...it's hard to argue with free! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation)
We've seen RISC-V show up in two spots: mostly in smaller, low-power microcontroller cores like the ESP-C6 (https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c6), but more recently, in larger boards like this one. One nice thing about having the RISC-V cores be powerful enough to run protected software like Linux is that you don't have to worry as much about compiler or learning the peripheral management because you can just run Python or use the Kernel Ioctl interfaces for hardware - the hard work has been done for you! And for this board you get a ready-to-boot Ubuntu installation. Which is awesome because sometimes you get really odd distro's for SBCs that end up eating all your time and energy to get them into a modern state.
Now that you have Linux running, you can use the FPGA to make custom hardware interfaces. To do that you'll need to use Libero (https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/fpga-and-soc-design-tools/fpga/libero-software-later-versions) as an FPGA IDE, and use the MAC address of the BeagleV for the floating license. But it does look like you can run libero natively on the BeagleV - there's apparently 'gateware' examples that will be published, for the M.2, SYZYGY, MIPI-CSI and Cape/GPIO hardware interface. So those design blocks can be built upon or tweaked to fit your end-needs.
Like other BeagleBoards, the files for the hardware are all published so you can look at the exact schematics and layout files (https://git.beagleboard.org/beaglev-fire/beaglev-fire), there's a Linux kernel fork (https://git.beagleboard.org/beagleboard/linux), Forums (https://forum.beagleboard.org/tags/c/beaglev/15/fire), and Discord chat! (https://bbb.io/discord)
If you're burning with excitement to get your hands on one of the new BeagleV-Fire SBC's from BeagleBoard.org (https://www.digikey.com/short/fz434q52), you're in luck because they are in stock right now at DigiKey for immediate shipment! Order today and they'll ship immediately so that you can get started designing your very own RISC-V-based super computation device by tomorrow afternoon.