PGA2350

by Pimoroni

A minimal but powerful RP2350 breakout board modelled on a Pin Grid Array, with the maximum exposed pins crammed into the smallest possible space.

PGA2350 is a compact RP2350 breakout designed to be embedded in projects where space is limited. It contains the components necessary to run the mighty RP2350B chip (that's the crystal, regulator and essential support circuits), a beefy 8MB of PSRAM and a prodigious 16MB of flash storage. Note that it has no LEDs, buttons or USB connectors - you'll need to attach your own USB connector to be able to program it.

All this drastic pruning means you get a small 25.4mm square footprint and a lot of exposed RP2350 pins to play with. 48 of them can be used as general purpose I/O (that's eighteen more I/O than on a Raspberry Pi Pico!) and 8 are ADC-equipped. We've even managed to squeeze in some tiny pin labels to help identify them.

Header pins are sold separately - you can use standard Pico pin headers (though bear in mind you'll need 64 pins if you want to populate it fully).

Features

  • Powered by RP2350B (Dual Arm Cortex M33 running at up to 150MHz with 520KB of SRAM)
  • 16MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
  • 8MB PSRAM (CS wired to GP47 via cuttable trace)
  • Crystal oscillator
  • On-board 3V3 regulator (max regulator current output 300mA)
  • 64 pins, arranged with 2.54mm (0.1") spacing in a Pin Grid Array
  • 48 multi-function General Purpose IO (8 can be used for ADC)
  • 6 GND pins
  • Input voltage range 3V - 5.5V (on VB pin only)
  • Measurements: approx 25.4mm x 25.4mm x 3.6mm (L x W x H)
  • Programmable with C/C++ or MicroPython

Pinout and Schematic

Getting Started

Notes

  • To program PGA2350 via USB you will need to hook wires up to VB, GND, U+ and U-. Make sure that the 5v only goes to VB on PGA2350, if it ends up elsewhere it will result in a bad time. A USB breakout board is a convenient way of getting at the wires in your USB cable.
  • To get into BOOTSEL mode so you can flash firmware to your PGA2350, connect the BS pin to ground with a convenient bit of metal whilst plugging the USB into your computer.

About RP2350

The RP2350 chip is the Double Quarter Pounder & Fries to the RP2040's Double Cheeseburger and can have one or more RISC-V burgers instead of either of the M33 ARMs, to stretch the metaphor.

In addition to the modern M33 ARM cores, there are sides of: more PIO capability, a variety of low power states for sipping electrons, a whole security system and some sprinklings of specialist digital video circuits to offload DVI/HDMI output.

You can expect a tasty boost in performance - our "real world" MicroPython tests are running up to 2x faster compared to RP2040, and floating point number crunching in C/C++ is up to 20x faster. The extra on-chip RAM will make a big difference when performing memory intensive operations (such as working with higher resolution displays) and even more can be added thanks to external PSRAM support.

RP2350 comes in two flavours - A (standard) and B (all the pins). The B chip has a stonking 48 usable GPIO pins, including 8 ADCs and 24 PWMs, and features on some of our new products. 

Click here to view all things RP2350!