Detailed Advantages of Rockchip's New RK3506 Chip Platform

The RK3506 is a new Arm embedded chip platform launched by Rockchip in the fourth quarter of 2024, featuring a tri-core Cortex-A7 and a single-core Cortex-M0 heterogeneous design, with a CPU frequency of up to 1.5GHz and an M0 MCU running at 200MHz.

The industrial-grade chip model RK3506J under the RK3506 platform features -40 to 85℃ wide temperature performance, low heat generation, rich IO interfaces, high immediacy, low latency, and fast response speed. It is equipped with Rockchip’s industrial-specific SDK, making it suitable for industrial applications. Today, Tactile Intelligence will analyze the five major technical highlights of RK3506J.

Industrial-Specific Design Interfaces

RK3506J has rich interfaces required for industrial gateways, including dual 100Mbps Ethernet ports, CAN FD interfaces, DSMC parallel communication buses for efficient FPGA expansion, UART ports, PWM ports, SPI, etc., as shown in the image:

Detailed Advantages of Rockchip's New RK3506 Chip Platform

Rockchip has upgraded the IO design of RK3506J, achieving a matrix configuration mechanism and flexible IOMUX allocation. The PWM interface features high-speed signal pulse counting (HSC), bidirectional counters, and waveform generators. RS485 can automatically send and receive with fast switching of read/write directions, and Ethernet supports the IEEE1588 protocol. The Flexbus interface can support the expansion of high-speed ADC and DAC with a sampling rate of up to 100MSPS.

Deep optimization of DSMC interface capabilities, especially for FPGA bandwidth throughput, with a write latency of less than 75ns and a read latency of less than 260ns. The bandwidth read/write throughput can exceed 400MB/s under 16-line working conditions.

Low Latency, High Real-Time Performance

RK3506J supports an AMP multi-core heterogeneous architecture, allowing a single chip to support a flexible combination of Linux, RTOS, and Bare-metal. The system has a microsecond-level interrupt response latency (<5us) and uses the standard RPMsg inter-core communication mechanism.

Rockchip provides Preempt-RT or Xenomai real-time patches for Linux systems. Under stress-ng load testing conditions, the system scheduling real-time performance can achieve a latency of 60+us.

System-level optimization based on EtherCATIgH and CODESYS protocols allows for precise control of servo motors by connecting multiple servo driver slaves via Ethernet, with a control cycle of 1 millisecond resulting in a jitter latency of about 90us, achieving a measured latency jitter performance within 10%, supporting 8-axis bus control.

Lightweight UI Framework

RK3506J SDK natively supports the LVGL lightweight UI framework and, combined with the chip’s internal 2D hardware acceleration, allows LVGL to run more smoothly. It has <50KB RAM lightweight operating conditions, includes 30+ components, supports Freetype fonts, and offers cross-platform support. From hardware power-on to bootloader loading and kernel loading, and finally to UI display, the full-link startup optimization takes less than 2.5 seconds (laboratory data for reference only).

Low Power Consumption, Longer Battery Life

‌Under full load operation (CPU overclocked to 1.6GHz, DDR 800MHz), the SOC power consumption of RK3506J is less than 650mW, with a temperature rise of less than 17° at room temperature.

Multi-System Support

The RK3506J SDK supports Linux Kernel 6.1, providing support for Buildroot and Yocto systems, while also supporting AMP multi-core heterogeneous systems. It is the first to achieve RTOS SMP mode on Rockchip’s multi-core architecture, adding support for multi-core scheduling in the implementation system.

New Product Preview

Tactile Intelligence is about to launch an industrial-grade core board based on Rockchip RK3506. Unlike traditional manufacturers’ RK3506 embedded products, Tactile Intelligence will introduce the RK3506 NearLink Gateway Development Board combined with star flash technology! Follow Tactile Intelligence and like this article to qualify for the product launch discount, stay tuned.

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Detailed Advantages of Rockchip’s New RK3506 Chip Platform

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