Alibaba Releases User Manuals for T-Head TH1520 RISC-V CPU

Alibaba has released nine user manuals for the T-Head TH1520 quad-core RISC-V processor. These manuals cover various aspects of the processor, including video and audio processing, peripheral interfaces, memory interfaces, system registers, and the built-in NPU for video acceleration.

The TH1520 RISC-V SoC was first mentioned in the expensive web3-focused ROMA laptop in October 2022. Since then, there have been interesting developments with the release of Sipeed’s Lichee Pi 4A SBC and various other platforms based on the LM4A system-on-module. Both boards have preliminary support in mainline Linux, with the Lichee Pi 4A making it to Linux 6.5 and the BeagleV Ahead being added to the Linux 6.6 kernel.

The user manuals for the TH1520 processor were not released publicly until now. Sipeed and Beagleboard.org have made available nine user manuals in English, with the Sipeed link also providing the Chinese versions.

While these user manuals are useful for people writing drivers for the TH1520 SoC, some of the documents may not provide enough details to be truly useful, especially those related to the video blocks of the TH1520 processors. Nonetheless, having public documentation is a step in the right direction.

Source: CNX Software – Embedded Systems News.