The Dabao is a powerful new evaluation board that fits the Baochip-1x, a RISC-V microcontroller, which is considered the “most open” possible due to its mostly open RTL architecture fabricated in the state-of-the-art 22nm process by TSMC. It acts as a ready point of entry to those developers who wish to experience high-performance, open-source silicon.
It puts engineers in a position to create a hardware generation of transparent, RISC-V-based hardware. Dabao is an important move that will put custom silicon more accessible to the global developer base, regardless of whether it is security research, at high-speed interfaces, or just general embedded development.
Dabao Evaluation Board Specifications
The core of the board is the Baochip-1x SoC, which has a VexRiscv CPU that runs at an impressive 350 MHz. It combines 2 MB RAM and 4 MB RRAM (a high-endurance substitute for conventional Flash) to facilitate vigorous operations. The only distinction of the hardware is its special I/O capabilities: it has a quad-core I/O accelerator with a pico based on the PicoRV322 with a speed of 700 MHz. This enables the chip to support complicated peripherals in a highly efficient, yet not exhausting, way for the main processor.
In terms of connectivity, the board has USB 2.0 High Speed (HS), which is compatible with the latest applications that are heavy on data. The project itself is supported by an open-hardware veteran team, including hardware hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang.
According to documentation, the Dabao evaluation board is supposed to support the standard RISC-V GNU toolchain for C/C++ development on its VexRiscv and PicoRV32 cores.
The Dabao evaluation board is currently listed as “Coming Soon” on Crowd Supply. Although the official price is still not finalised, it is the goal of the staff to make it an affordable point of entry into the Baochip-1x. On the page where the project is updated, you can subscribe so as to receive the news as soon as the campaign is launched and orders are opened.