Qomu: An MCU and FPGA Dev Kit the Size of Your Thumbnail

Qomu is a complete System on Chip (SoC), yet it is the size of your thumbnail!
Qomu, part of the Tomu family of USB devices, is a full SoC with an FPGA that can fit inside a USB port. FPGAs can be used to aid machine learning, emulate CPUs, and create custom circuitry. We are free to program the FPGA to do as we wish, then reset and reprogram it to perform another task. Qomu offers all this while still retaining a tiny footprint.

Qomu MCU & FPGA — (Image credit: Crowd Supply)

Qomu provides a microcontroller (MCU) and an FPGA in a tiny package. But what can it be used for?

"The QuickLogic EOS S3 SoC on Qomu integrates an Arm® Cortex-M4F MCU and an embedded FPGA (eFPGA), which means you can seamlessly blend firmware with gateware. Whether you need an accelerated machine learning classifier or glue logic for a new peripheral, the EOS S3 SoC puts you in control of making fine-grained design tradeoffs. Qomu is the perfect EOS S3 dev kit to get started — slot it into any USB Type-A port and take your project development with you everywhere you go." -- Qomu Crowd Supply.

Qomu packs plenty of features and power inside the rather tiny package.

As Qomu uses QuickLogic’s EOS S3 multicore MCU + eFPGA SoC, it can be used with a plethora of open source tools such as Zephyr, FreeRTOS, nMigen, SymbiFlow, and Renode.

The Qomu project is coming soon on Crowd Supply.

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Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".