By: Han Mao
Last year at the RISC-V Summit, China, T-Head introduced the high-performance SoC prototype TH1520 based on the C910 processor. This prototype has 4K video processing capabilities, rich heterogeneous computing, and high-speed I/O resources. Based on the hardware platform, we have upgraded our support for Android 12, and integrated the software stack for audio and video, camera, WiFi/BT and AI acceleration.
This year to gap the difference between available hardware devices, T-Head began to work on hardware development board support in the ecosystem . Recently, two development boards, BeagleV®-Ahead (BeagleBoard.org) and Lichee Pi4A (Sipeed), have been publicly released.
These two development boards both integrate the TH1520 SoC, which includes quad-core C910 processor running at 2.0G and a built-in 4-TOPS NPU. The built-in GPU operates OpenGL ES, OpenCL, and Vulkan. It has multiple device interfaces such as USB, WiFi/BT, Ethernet, HDMI, and MIPI CSI/DSI, which can meet the development needs of common Android devices.
Figure1: T-Head TH1520 block diagram.
These development boards are currently available for public accessed through the link below:
https://beagleboard.org/beaglev-ahead
We have extended support for the respective development board, as well as for both Android12 and AOSP mainline.
We have added U-Boot and Linux related support to the TH1520 based development boards, including memory initialization, board-level peripheral driver, and DTS files. The Linux kernel related board-level support is currently actively merging upstream and is expected to be seen in the mainline code soon.
In the Android main project, we added version check related logic and adjusted pre-compiled modules, HAL layer, compilation options, and compatibility matrix related support for the mainline version. This resolved many compilation issues, allowing support for different system versions.
Figure2: Running AOSP main branch on TH1520 based development boards
Currently, the Android system(main branch) can be fully launched, we have verified the HAL layer of devices such as GPU, VPU, and USB. The AOSP mainline support for these boards is now available on Gitee/Github open-source repositories：
https://gitee.com/thead-android/thead-android
https://github.com/T-head-Semi/riscv-aosp
While we are gradually improving the mainline codes, the board-level support for the mainline version of TH1520 based boards will also be iterated continuously. We also welcome developers from the community to try, evaluate, and contribute to it.
If you want to learn more about the Android on RISC-V support, you can subscribe to the RISC-V Android SIG mailing list and join us to discussions.
https://lists.riscv.org/g/sig-android
The Android mainline support of RISC-V is still being continuously improved, and related status and issues can be accessed through the following link: https://github.com/google/android-riscv64