You can preorder Dabao #Baochip evaluation boards for US$10. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-04-09The #Baochip is “the latest step in the #Betrusted initiative, spurred by work I [#Bunnie] did with Ed Snowden 8 years ago trying to answer the question of “can we trust hardware to not betray us?” in the context of mass surveillance by state-level adversaries.” #security
> a SoC featuring a 350MHz Vexriscv CPU + MMU, combined with a I/O processor (“BIO”) featuring quad 700MHz PicoRV32s, 4MiB of nonvolatile memory (in the form of RRAM), and 2MiB of SRAM. Also packed into the chip are features typically found exclusively in secure elements, such as a TRNG, a variety of cryptographic accelerators, secure mesh, glitch sensors, ECC-protected RAM, hardware protected key slots and one-way counters.”
How did he get it fabbed? “I “hitchhiked” on a 22 nm chip designed primarily by Crossbar, Inc. I was able to include a CPU of my choice, along with a few other features, in some unused free space on the chip’s floorplan. By switching off which CPU is active, you can effectively get two chips for the price of one mask set.
He expects to have thousands of them to sell later in 02026, and you can pre-order the “Dabao” evaluation board for earlier delivery.
on 02026-04-09#Bunnie helped design “the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC”, with an improved version of the #RP2350’s PIO peripheral. Instead of a special-purpose instruction set like PIO, you have BIO, four of Claire Xenia Wolf’s PicoRV32 #RISC-V processors each with 4KiB of RAM, running at 700MHz, modified with a trick from his PhD thesis ADAM to map the non-RV32E registers to FIFOs; also they can DMA to and from the main CPU’s RAM. But it’s slower than PIO, can’t bitbang DVI. #Baochip #electronics #hardware #toread
on 02026-04-09