Product of the Week: Conclusive Engineering’s RCHD-PF Orchid, FPGA-Integrated System on Module

February 12, 2024

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The needs of embedded computing applications are constantly evolving, requiring versatile feature sets, rapid processing needs, reliable ruggedness, and more. The ability to maintain flexibility and programmability in one solution enables applications like automotive, industrial automation, AI & ML, IoT, and image and video processing to efficiently progress along with the ever-changing high-performance needs.

The RCHD-PF Orchid from Conclusive Engineering is an advanced System on Module (SoM) integrating the hardware programmability and configuration of an FPGA with Microchip’s PolarFire SoC FPGA in an FCVG 484 package.

Conclusive Engineering’s RCHD-PF Orchid, FPGA-Integrated System on Module measures at 65 x 45 mm, with the mainboard being 30% smaller than a credit card.

The RCHD-PF Orchid in Action

The architecture of the CPU is RISC-V deterministic, equipped with a 667 MHz 5-core RISC-V processor made up of four application cores and one monitor/boot core. The Microchip PolarFire SoC provides up to 3.125 CoreMarks/MHz and 1.714 DMIPS/MHz of processing performance, and logic elements ranging from 23k to 254k within the product family.

For memory, the RCHD-PF Orchid offers LPDDR4 in capacities ranging from 512 MB, 1, 2 or 4GB, operating at 1600 MT/s. The SoM also provides eMMC 5.0 for mass storage, ranging from 4-64 GB, as well as 4 KB EEPROM and NOR Flash memory (32 MB) for FPGA configuration.

Networking and I/O is supported by one 10/100/1000 Ethernet PHY and 10/100/1000 Ethernet MAC (SGMII interface), in addition to up to four PCIe 2.0 ports and one USB 2.0 OTG. For debugging, the SoM supports a Conclusive Developer Cable connector providing access to System UART, JTAG port, and System I2C bus.

Additional features include:

• 802.11/b/g/n WiFi with u.fl antenna connector (optional)
• RTC with external battery back-up
• 30 high speed differential GPIO / 60 high speed single ended GPIO
• 32 differential GPIO / 64 single ended GPIO
• 4 XCVR bidirectional lanes (12.3Gbps)
• single 3.3V 12A power supply
• operating temperature between –40 °C to 85 °C

Getting Started with the RCHD-PF Orchid

The RCHD-PF Orchid comes equipped, or requested, with a wide variety of software support for Linux 5.16 and newer, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, U-Boot, Buildroot, Yocto and other distributions on request, FreeBSD 13 on request, FreeRTOS, and Zephyr.

For a closer look at the RCHD-PF Orchid, FPGA-Integrated SOM, check out the video from Conclusive Engineering below:

For information on how-tos and tutorials, visit the wiki page here.

Additional Resources:

• Product Page: https://conclusive.tech/products/rchd-pf-som/
• Datasheet: https://conclusive.tech/static/docs/rchd-pf/DS_040100_20220426_rchd-pf.pdf
• Wiki: https://conclusive.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CW/pages/34177124/RCHD-PF
• PolarFire SoC FPGAs: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/fpgas-and-plds/system-on-chip-fpgas/polarfire-soc-fpgas