Raspberry Pi COO James Adams discusses the company’s first custom Arm chip, designed in-house with Arm Flexible Access and now at the heart of the Raspberry Pi Pico, as recounted to Arm Blueprint:

Designing a sub-$5 computer involves several tough decisions. Decisions such as which instruction set architecture (ISA) to use and which class of chip IP to select from within that ecosystem in order to balance price, power and performance. Then there are design and manufacturing questions: who’s going to design the system on chip (SoC) and who’s going to fabricate it?

All of these considerations dictate how useful and affordable your final product is. So when it came to selecting a chip to power our first microcontroller-class product, Raspberry Pi Pico, we knew that we needed to push that price-performance ratio harder than ever before.

See the video below of the Pico emulating a BBC Micro and read the article on arm.com here.