Alibaba, the Chinese giant behind Aliexpress, has also wanted to follow in the footsteps of Amazon, as you know, and has fully entered the world of technology, both at the level of devices created by themselves and also cloud services. Now they have published important documentation on the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 quad-core RISC-V processor, including user manuals and technical information about the device, both at the GPU level, as well as the integrated audio, memory interfaces, available registers, built-in NPU, etc.
This Alibaba T-Head TH1520 SoC already gave a lot to talk about when it was used to give life to a laptop named ROME and that appeared in October 2022. But, since then, there have been interesting launches using this chip, such as the SBC BeagleV Ahead, a competitor to the Raspberry Pi, but based on the RISC-V ISA, and with support for the Linux 6.6 kernel.
- To download the free manual, you can do so from either the Sipeed website, as from the official website of the company itself BeagleBoard. Unfortunately, these manuals are only in Chinese and English at the moment. No Spanish, but the English ones can be of great help for the moment.
Specifically, they have been launched 9 manuals in PDF format, and each one is aimed at explaining an aspect of the Alibaba T-Head TH1520:
- TH1520 Audio Processing User Manual.pdf: It has 141 pages of documentation for CPR (Component Parameter Register), I2S, TDM, VAD, and SPDIF audio.
- TH1520 Memory Interface User Manual.pdf- With 261 pages, you will get information about SRAMC, LPDDR4, eMMC/SD, and QSPI memory system.
- TH1520 NPU User Manual.pdf: 12 pages where you can see a quick introduction and the capabilities of the integrated AI accelerator, that is, the NPU.
- TH1520 Peripheral Interface User Manual.pdf: has 375 pages on GMAC, USB, MPJTAG, ADC, I2S, PWM, I2C, UART, and GPIO interfaces.
- TH1520 System User Manual.pdf: It is the most extensive manual of all, with no less than 1.240 pages, and shows all aspects of the system user, such as the address map, interrupts, pinmux, clock, reset, low power modes, Boot, processors (C910, C906 and E902), DSP, MBOX, RTC, WDT, Timers, DMAC, PVT, system configuration, and BMU (Bus Monitor Unit).
- TH1520 Video CODEC User Manual.pdf: 14 pages on video encoding and decoding.
- TH1520 Video Image Processing User Manual.pdf- Documentation on the 3D GPU (BXM-4-64), G2D 2D Accelerator, and DEWARP Processor, with 18 pages of information.
- TH1520 Video Input User Manual.pdf: is a document with 85 pages to learn about MIPI CSI, VIPRE (GLUE, MIPI2DMA and MUX logic), ISP, and IVS (interaction between ISP-VENC) video inputs.
- TH1520 Video Output User Manual.pdf: and finally, 37 pages to explain the video outputs composed of DPU, HDMI, and MIPI DSI.
Thanks to them, among other things, it will be possible to develop new drivers for this SoC, to support Linux and other systems…