Boardcon has entered the growing Allwinner T536 ecosystem with two new products: the PICOT536 system-on-module and the EMT536 development board. Both target industrial applications like HMI panels, machine vision, and robotics, joining similar T536-based offerings from MYiR Tech and Forlinx that have appeared over the past year. The T536 pairs a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor clocked at 1.6 GHz with dual RISC-V coprocessors (XuanTie E907 and E902) and a 2 TOPS NPU for on-device inference, making it a versatile choice for edge computing workloads that need a bit of AI capability without a big power budget.

The PICOT536 SoM measures 8.2 x 5.0 cm (3.2 x 2.0 inches) on an eight-layer PCB and connects to carrier boards through a 314-pin MXM 3.0 edge connector. Configuration options include up to 8 GB of LPDDR4/LPDDR4X with inline ECC, up to 64 GB eMMC, and an optional WiFi 6 plus Bluetooth 5.4 module. The connector exposes a rich set of interfaces: MIPI DSI, LVDS, up to four MIPI CSI camera lanes, dual Gigabit Ethernet PHYs, USB 3.0, PCIe 2.1, eleven UARTs, CAN bus, RS485, SPI, and multiple ADC channels. Industrial-temperature variants rated from -40°C to +85°C (-40°F to +185°F) are available alongside the standard 0°C to +70°C (32°F to +158°F) commercial option.

The EMT536 development board breaks out those interfaces into a 18.0 x 12.0 cm (7.1 x 4.7 inches) carrier with dual Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports, an M.2 M-Key slot for NVMe SSDs, an mPCIe slot with SIM socket for 4G LTE, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 host ports, a USB Type-C OTG port, a microSD slot, and a 3.5 mm headset jack. Some interfaces are multiplexed, so USB 3.0 and the mPCIe slot share a lane, and only one display output (LVDS or MIPI DSI) can be active at a time. On the software side, Boardcon ships a Buildroot environment with Linux kernel 5.15.147 and U-Boot 2023.04, along with drivers for CAN, RS485, NVMe, WiFi/Bluetooth, and 4G LTE connectivity. Open-source users tracking upstream progress will find that the linux-sunxi community has begun documenting the T536, with early mainlining work underway at the SoC level (including pinctrl support), though the chip has not yet landed in the mainline kernel, meaning the vendor-provided BSP remains the practical path for development today.

Pricing and availability have not been announced yet. More details are available on the Boardcon product page and the official press release.