Raspberry Pi Pico 2's RP2350 SoC goes on general sale

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the Pico 2 W have been on sale for a number of months now, but the chip that powers it, the RP2350 has not been generally available. This has all changed with Raspberry Pi releasing the RP2350 for general sale for those eager to integrate the powerful microcontroller into their projects.

If you want your own RP2350 for a project, then you can pick them up from approved Raspberry Pi resellers. Just visit the official page and click on the Buy Now button in the top right. At the time of writing, we could not find any resellers for the United States, however UK reseller Pimoroni offers a bundle of 10 RP2350A chips for £8.80 ($9) and 10 RP2350B for £9.60 ($10). If you need a smaller amount, The Pi Hut is offering a five-pack of the RP2350A for £4.40 ($4.50) and a five-pack of RP2350B for £4.80 ($5).

RP235X Packages

The RP235X comes in four different options, but at this time only the RP2350A and B will be going on general sale. The first is the $1.10 RP2350A. This is what we find on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2 W. The QFN-60 package has no internal flash, 30 GPIO pins, of which there are four analog inputs. The $1.20 RP2350B is a larger, QFN-80 package. There still isn't any onboard flash, but we do get more GPIO pins (48 in total) of which eight are analog inputs. We've got a full breakdown of all the RP235X models, their specs and a full list of GPIO pins in our handy guide. Note that the RP2354A and B are not on general sale. They should be on sale later this year.

All the RP2350s come with the same Dual-Core Arm Cortex M33 and RISC-V Hazard3 CPUs running at 150 MHz, and we have 4MB of onboard SRAM to run our projects. If you are designing your own boards based on the RP2350, then you could add some PSRAM (Pseudo Static RAM) to give your projects extra space to run. Storage for the RP2350 boards is via an external QSPI chip.

The choice of CPUs in the RP2350 is intriguing. The first is the traditional Dual-Core Arm Cortex M33 that has plenty of power to get the job done. But there is also a Dual-Core RISC-V Hazard3 CPU, marking the first time that a RISC-V chip has been integrated into a Raspberry Pi product. The chip was designed by Raspberry Pi's own Luke Wren, as a project in his spare time. The Hazard3 chip is a fork of the Hazard5, another Wren project, designed for the RISCboy open source Nintendo Game Boy Advance. Wren has been working on logic design since he was a student, and the fruits of his labor are now for all to see. Could we see more RISC-V chips baked into Raspberry Pi? Possibly, but the traditional Arm CPU used in the Raspberry Pi 5 will be here for some time to come.

If you want to make your own RP2350-powered projects, but don't have the facilities to fabricate your own PCBs, Raspberry Pi has recently announced that JCLPCB are offering the RP230A and B for inclusion in your own projects. The RP2354A and B (with internal flash) will be available later this year. So now all you need to do is fire up your favorite EDA package and start designing your very own RP2350 projects.