The pico2-ice is a low-cost development board that integrates the Raspberry Pi RP2350B microcontroller with a Lattice iCE40UP5K FPGA, offering a compact platform for education, prototyping, and digital design experiments.
The board succeeds the original pico-ice, which universities across the US, EU, and South America widely adopt as a teaching tool for FPGA programming and hardware design. It’s also been used by companies to quickly build prototypes because it has a mix of a microcontroller and an FPGA, and its design is open-source.
Pico2-ice specifications:
The pico2-ice is built around the RP2350B dual-core Arm processor and the iCE40UP5K FPGA that features 5.3K LUTs, 1Mb SPRAM, 120Kb DPRAM, and 8 hardware multipliers. Both devices include their own dedicated SPI flash and connect through easily accessible 0.1-inch headers, which follow the Pmod form factor for fast prototyping with add-on modules.
Other onboard hardware includes 4MB SPI flash, 8MB low-power qSPI SRAM, two RGB LEDs, two pushbuttons, and voltage regulators (3.3V/1.2V). All GPIOs from the RP2350 and 32 FPGA pins are available on headers, giving developers direct access for hardware projects. The board is designed with a 4-layer PCB and solid ground plane to ensure good signal integrity, and all design files are open source under OSHW certification using KiCAD tools.
It is a flexible platform to explore hardware description languages (HDLs), embedded programming, and system prototyping at an affordable price is provided to students, hobbyists, and engineers by the pico2-ice through the combination of a microcontroller with a fully programmable FPGA.
According to the company, it supports firmwares including MicroPython, which developers can use to configure the FPGA and manage the FPGA clock directly from the RP2350. The FPGA clock is fully software programmable, and the MCU communicates with the FPGA over dedicated pins, making it easy to set up mixed MCU-FPGA applications.
We have previously covered Raspberry Pi-based SBCs like the XpressReal T3 and the Ebyte ECB31-PB. You can check them for reference, because these are kind of similar to this Pico2-ice.
The pico2-ice board is available now for $54 with optional PMOD soldering, directly from TinyVision’s store and other distributors like Tindie and Lectronz at $49.99. You can get PCB design files and documentation on their GitHub.
Images used courtesy of TinyVision, and Thanks to Hackster.io for the tip.