st January at a price of just US$4. The Pico is a microcontroller - a device-class often paired with a more powerful computer for analogue input and low-latency I/O, and sometimes a very-low power standby mode. One of the most interesting things about the Pico was that it became the first product to feature 'Raspberry Silicon', in the shape of the RP2040, and on Monday one of the engineers tasked with making this first in-house processor design wrote a blog on the whole process, entitled The journey to Raspberry Silicon.
The journey began in the summer of 2017. After deciding what fundamental components the RP2040 would require, design went ahead using industry standard tools like Verilog and VHDL. Testing and verification was done first in simulation, and as things become more advanced the design team started to use FPGAs. Even the fastest FPGA's the chip designers used only ran at 48MHz, while the final RP2040 production chip would run at 133MHz.