RP2350, our second-generation microcontroller, is very nearly a year old. Since August last year, we’ve sold over half a million Pico 2 and Pico 2 W boards, and RP2350 itself has found its way into countless third-party products, from secure displays to development boards to synthesisers.

Like any silicon device, RP2350 wasn’t perfect on day one. The launch stepping, designated A2, is affected by a number of errata, including an error in the GPIO pad design which prevents pads from properly going into a high-impedance state (Erratum 9), and a number of security issues identified by participants in our RP2350 Hacking Challenge. Today, we’re happy to announce the immediate availability of a new A4 stepping, which addresses the vast majority of these issues.

To coincide with the availability of the A4 stepping, we’re also launching RP2354: pin-compatible variants of the 60-pin RP2350A and 80-pin RP2350B parts with 2MB of flash memory in-package. Each RP2354 part costs just 20 cents more than the equivalent RP2350 part.

And finally, we have another RP2350 Hacking Challenge, offering a $20,000 prize for a practical side-channel attack on the power-hardened AES library that underpins our decrypting bootloader.

...read more at raspberrypi.com