Reverse engineering the RP2350 chip powering the Raspberry Pi Pico 2

The electronupdate blog performs a die level tetardown of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and it’s new RP2350 chip.

Star of the show is the new RP2350.  A number of changes, perhaps the most intriguing is two ARM M33 cores _or_ two RISCV Hazard 3 cores.  No question that ARM dominates the embedded processor space, however there is a challenger on the sidelines: RISCV.

Rather than taking the risk of building a RISC V produce they cleverly put both on their next die allowing the customer to switch between architectures if they want.  This is a clever way of judging market demand without exposing too much cost.

Same 40 nm as the previous Pi Pico but the die is quite a bit larger.   left-bottom of die covered by a power distribution network: a sure sign of the digital portion of a design.  The pink bits are ‘hard-macros’ of bought in IP such as the USB interface ADC converters, etc.

See the video below and more in the post here.