Open source drivers now available for the MT3620 Azure Sphere MCU

New drivers and samples are now available for the Arm® Cortex®-M4 with FPU cores in the MediaTek MT3620 MCU, the first Azure Sphere chip certified by Microsoft. Two developer experiences are now available:

• Drivers and samples from MediaTek now available on GitHub.
• Codethink, a partner in the Azure Sphere ecosystem, has also published drivers and samples on GitHub.

Microsoft will continue to publish instructions to get started with the Cortex-M4 with FPU on the MT3620, along with some associated samples within the Azure Sphere samples repo. While the samples are not complete drivers, they may be instructive in some scenarios, particularly inter-core communications between the Arm® Cortex®-A7 application core and the Cortex-M4 with FPU cores for real-time peripheral I/O processing.

Further discussion at Microsoft IoT tech community.

The MT3620: Combining Application Processor, Real-time I/O Processors & Generous Peripheral IO

MediaTek MT3620 features an Arm Cortex-A7 application plus two general purpose Arm Cortex-M4 with FPU handling the I/O subsystems. MT3620-based development boards and add-ons are available via Seeed Studio.

The Arm Cortex-A7 processor operates up to 500MHz and includes large L1 cache and L2 cache and integrated SRAM for highly efficient operation over a wide range of potential applications. Two Arm Cortex-M4 with FPU operate up to 200MHz and support the requirements of the many on-chip peripherals including 5x UART/I2C/SPI, 2x I2S, 8x ADC, up to 12 PWM counters and up to 72x GPIO, allowing a diverse range of potential applications.

These two Arm Cortex-M4 with FPU are primarily intended to support real-time I/O processing but can also be used for general purpose computation and control. These cores may run any end-user-provided operating system or run a ‘bare metal app’ with no operating system.

Flash memory to support the Cortex-A7 and both Cortex-M4 with FPU is integrated in the MT3620 package.