Wiznet W55RP20-EVB-Pico board features W55RP20 SiP with W5500 Ethernet controller and RP2040 MCU

Wiznet has recently released the W55RP20-EVB-Pico dev board, a compact board based around the W55RP20 SiP that fuses the Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU and the W5500 Ethernet controller into a single IC, plus a 2MB flash chip for firmware storage.

Just last month we wrote about W5100S-EVB-Pico2 and W5500-EVB-Pico2 dev boards, both the boards have a newer Raspberry Pi RP2350 MCU and external Ethernet controller (W5500 or W5100S). The RP2350 offers additional security features such as One Time Programmable (OTP) memory, secure boot, and Arm TrustZone technology, making it more suitable for secure applications. The W55RP20 on the other hand integrates a W5500 Ethernet controller and the RP2040 in a single SiP which is also pin-compatible with the Raspberry Pi Pico, making it easy to use existing Pico accessories and code examples.

W55RP20-EVB-Pico dev board specifications:

• SiP– W55RP20 microcontroller
  • MCU – Raspberry Pi RP2040
    • Core– Dual Cortex M0+ cores up to 133 MHz
    • Memory – 264kB on-chip SRAM in six independent banks
  • Ethernet controller W5500
    • 10/100 Mbps Ethernet with Auto-Negotiation (Full/Half Duplex)
    • Supports TCP, UDP, ICMP, IGMP, IPv4, ARP, PPPoE
    • 8 Independent Hardware SOCKETs
    • Internal 32 Kbytes Memory for TX/ RX Buffers
    • High-Speed Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI MODE 0, 3)
  • Storage – 2MByte on-chip flash memory
• Ethernet – 10/100Mbps RJ45 port with PoE support
• USB – USB C-Type port for power, data, and reprogramming Flash
• I/Os
  • 40-pin 0.1″ through-hole pins and edge castellations with 22 usable GPIOs
    • 2x Programmable IO (PIO) blocks, 8x state machines in total
    • 2x UART, 2x SPI, 2x I2C
    • 16x PWM
    • 1x Timer with 4 alarms,
    • 1x Real Time Counter
    • 4x 12-bit 500ksps Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC)
• Debugging – 3-pin ARM Serial Wire Debug (SWD) port
• Power Supply
  • Switch-mode DC-DC converter (replacing LDO for enhanced power efficiency)
    • VBUS – DC 5V (+/- 10%)
    • VSYS – 4.3V to 5.5V
• Dimensions – 80 x 21mm
• Operation Conditions
  • Max Operating Temperature – 85°C (including self-heating)
  • Min Operating Temperature – -45°C
  • Recommended max ambient temperature – 70°C
• Certification – CE, FCC

As mentioned in the specifications the W55RP20-EVB-Pico dev board features two Programmable IO blocks with eight state machines for flexible and high-speed user-programmable IO, which in simple terms can emulate SD Card and VGA interfaces.

The SiP itself supports both MicroPython and C/C++ programming, and the company Wiki page provides us with a lot of example codes including Ethernet, AWS, Azure, LwIP, FreeRTOS, and other micropython examples which can also be found on the GitHub repo.

The W55RP20-EVB-Pico dev board can now be purchased from Sparkfun, priced at around $10.95. Alternatively, it’s also available on ThePiHut for £8.25.

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