Embedded Hardware with the Raspberry Pi Team
James Adams, Liam Fraser, and Luke Renn from Raspberry Pi Trading discuss the development of the RP2040 microcontroller and the Pico board. They explain the architectural decisions behind the chip, including the use of programmable IO (PIO) state machines, the choice of Cortex-M0+ cores, and the strategic decision to use external flash to maximize SRAM and minimize cost. The conversation also covers the company's flat engineering culture, their low-cost manufacturing strategy, and the integration of the Compute Module 4 (CM4) into industrial applications.