Future Teensy features & pinout

PaulStoffregen said:
Now that NXP has publicly announced the IMXRT1170 chip, we can finally start talking about far-future (late 2020 -- EDIT: early 2021.....) features and form factors and pinouts.

EDIT Again: every appearance is these new IMXRT117X chips will not be in volume production until the end of 2021 or early 2022.
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Any news re: volume production?
 
Frank B said:
Any news re: volume production?
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2021 is a lousy year to try to launch a new electronic product. Lots of parts are either not available or stupidly expensive right now. Worse, you’re competing with every large volume electronic and automotive mfg to get parts. For example, try to buy FRAM in any volume and see how far you get. I’m guessing we’re not going see any new board until late 2022 at best.
 
Distributors are showing a small number of the 800 MHz industrial temperature range parts arriving near the end of 2021. But beyond those, all appearances look like 1 GHz 1170 chips won't exist in volume production until much later. How much later, I don't know. You can check out the various distributor website and see the same info I see. It's pretty depressing...
 
Unfortunately it's not just the rt117X. Many other previously common parts are difficult-to-impossible to get this year. It really demonstrates the fragility of our supply chains.

Anybody want to go into the shipping container business with me? :)
 
It is the fact that everything is produced in Far East, too.
Not only silicon. Medical products, too.
The whole world has long been dependent on the Far East.
Nobody cares.
 
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1170 eval board updates

I've added some results from testing Paul's RSAsign on 1170 eval board (SDK)]. Crypto acceleration hardware provides 8x speedup. Also did some Ethernet/lwIP testing (TCP, UDP, ping). See updates to post #494.
 
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Hi, I know I'm extremely late to this thread. Just thought I'd offer my input and how I've been using Teensy 4.1 so far.

I'm a researcher and often build high channel-count data acquisition systems for various projects. It's often a real pain to develop FPGA based systems so I often try to prototype them first using a Teensy. This is what I often find myself using/needing:

1. High pin-count GPIO ports - I often use GPIO ports as parallel data busses - like 16-pin data busses. For example, I can use Teensy to bit-bang a 16 wire bus with a high speed ADC. On the Teensy 4.1 I achieved ~250 Mbps data rates this way - pretty amazing!

As far as I remember, the Teensy 4.1 only had 1 full 16 bit GPIO port available. It would be great to have more.

2. Memory. This is partially covered with the existing PSRAM, but there is nevertheless a serious memory bottleneck. I see the new 1170 chip supports eMMC - if you can take advantage of this to provide faster memory it would be amazing.

3. EMI. I'm sure Paul is well aware of this, but the Teensy 4.1 pinout is problematic. It generates severe EMI and poor edge rates due to not having enough spaced-out GND pins. If you go for a larger or 2-row pinout I hope some of the additional pins will be used for GND.

Anyway, these are just some of my thoughts. The 4.1 was an amazing board and I look forward to the next release! Thanks Paul!
 
I'd like to add my $0.02.

What I'd really like to see is a more integrated development experience with debugging through USB. If possible I'd also like to see being able to upload code without having to push a button on the Teensy.

I'm also trying to get in contact with Eben Upton to urge him to do something similar with the Raspberry Pi Pico.
 
Also it needs a "reset button"/input so that we don't need to do workarounds such as power cycle, even Arduino have a reset input.
Really need that now when trying out the dynamic audio lib, and other similar cases.
The 5sec on/off button just takes too much time to use.
 
I may said it before but I also vote for more spaced out gnd pins, as it's not good for any EMC performances to have huge gnd loops.
 
manicksan said:
Also it needs a "reset button"/input so that we don't need to do workarounds such as power cycle, even Arduino have a reset input.
Really need that now when trying out the dynamic audio lib, and other similar cases.
The 5sec on/off button just takes too much time to use.
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The ON/OFF timeout can be altered. See : github.com/FrankBoesing/T4_PowerButton
Seems the 1062 MCU doesn't offer a standard method of RESET as constructed - not sure if that changes with new MCU?
 
bigpilot said:
...
What I'd really like to see is a more integrated development experience with debugging through USB. If possible I'd also like to see being able to upload code without having to push a button on the Teensy.
...
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If the Teensy is running a USB Serial interface - and not crashed - then pushing the Button isn't needed as it will respond to the Host requesting 'entry to bootloader'. The Button is just there for those other cases - at least when using Teensy Loader - or TyCommander when that works.

Indeed USB Debugging isn't supported. Paul once noted it would get attention when Arduino made provisions for it? Based on that hopefully it is possible, but not yet integrated into the current IDE for Arduino so it hasn't gotten any dev time.
 
Indeed USB Debugging isn't supported. Paul once noted it would get attention when Arduino made provisions for it? Based on that hopefully it is possible, but not yet integrated into the current IDE for Arduino so it hasn't gotten any dev time.
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Debugging is available using Visual Micro as a programming interface for Teensy/Arduino/Esp. See here.
 
Hi Paul

For me the most important features are the ADC and DAC. And a 1 MHz or faster ADC would be fantastically important. That would allows us to use it with the new linear imaging sensors. The low cost market for instruments that use those, has enabled a lot of "equal access" to do science in places where they do not have access to adequate funding.

The RT1170 specs list the max conversion clock frequency as 88 MHz. If that means 6 MHz sampling at 12 bits, and you could please please accommodate that in the board, it would be a tremendous help.

Thank you
 
Marathonman said:
this brutal chip .... Simply amazing.
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Every appearance is this isn't really a chip anyone can actually buy, but rather a "core" (just a bunch of design files) which large companies designing custom chips would license for custom chips they design and have manufactured.

Here is the company's website, which links to a press release

http://www.micromagic.com/index.html

The press release states "By lowering the operating voltage to 350mV, Micro Magic's 64-bit RISC-V core runs at 1GHz and is able to achieve 2,500 Coremarks in a 16nm FinFET process." I don't follow the silicon industry closely, but my understanding is until just recently, Intel's high end i5,i7,i9 CPU chips for all PC computers were made with 14nm FinFET process, just to put this statement in perspective.

The Embedded article has a photo with a PCB having 1 chip visible (strangely in a 1990s-era QFP package rather than wafer scale BGA or other modern package normally used with today's advanced silicon processes) which appears to be sitting on top of an Odroid XU4 single board computer. I recall the SiFive guys gave a demo at the Teardown 2018 conference where a RISC-V processor they designed did not yet have working PCIE (or pretty much any other working I/O), so they connected its bus to some insanely expensive bus bridge which let it use PCIE peripherals on another motherboard-like SBC, which allowed their new chip to boot up Linux. Whether that's what Micro Magic is doing with the Odroid XU4 (which doesn't seem to make any sort of system bus available on those connectors) but how that Odroid board could possibly serve as peripherals or some other way to bootstrap their custom chip, I have no idea. At least in my mind, that photo raises a lot more questions than it answers. Maybe their chip was designed to be perfectly pin compatible with whatever chip Odroid had used, and they desoldered the original chip and soldered theirs in its place? (and the 1990-looking chip on the top just an analog chip making the current measurement?) And even though their chip supposedly uses so little power, they put Odroid's heatsink+fan back on? (that is Odroid's heatsink we can just barely see in the photo, right?) But if that demo really is their chip soldered to the Odroid PCB, how would Odroid's hardware provide the special 0.35 volt power their press release mentions? So many unanswerable questions...

They make a lot of pretty incredible claims. I'd take that with a grain of salt for now. But the main thing to keep in mind is, for a base case scenario where everything they've said is accurate and every impression they've given is genuinely representative of reality (I kinda have some doubts...), this isn't actually a chip, just like how ARM doesn't make any actual chips. It's a design they intend to license to other companies who will use it to make real chips. Maybe it will eventually lead to incredible microcontrollers.

Just to keep a realistic idea of time frame, ARM announced Cortex M7 in 2014. Atmel and others came out with some lackluster M7 parts a couple years later. It was 2017 when NXP started providing early info (under NDA) for the 600 MHz IMXRT parts we have now, and first samples appeared in 2018. Much of the Teensy 4 design was done in the 2nd half of 2018, and a 8 month beta test began in January 2019, with the first Teensy 4.0 boards shipping in August 2019. That's the sort of time frame from a microcontroller CPU core to the availability of actual chips you can buy and a usable Arduino or similar dev environment... with ARM having decades of experience selling processor cores, with Freescale (now NXP) working closely with ARM and having a huge collection of mature peripheral IP, and PJRC already having an Arduino compatible core library designed around most of the Freescale peripherals which were reused from their earlier Kinetis parts.

A "brutal" chip may indeed appear at some point, but it probably will take several years.
 
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From the position on the wires, kinda looks like they're plugged in only the power cord and ethernet cable.

screenshot.jpg

Maybe there's a normal PC running Linux we don't see in the photo which connects to the Odroid hardware over ethernet?
 
@paulstoffregen Are there any plans to expose/enable MIPI DSI on this new chip for future Teensys? I think it’s a great feature to enable. Just my two cents. Thanks! :)
 
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