BIO – The Bao I/O Co-Processor
Summary
BIO – The Bao I/O Co-Processor introduces an open-source I/O co-processor architecture built from four PicoRV32 cores to offload I/O tasks. It contrasts with Raspberry Pi PIO, highlighting lower area and higher clock-rate potential with BDMA support and a Rust/C tooling path, while trading off IPC and complexity. The article discusses design decisions, real-time features, and example code for DMA and SPI use-cases, framing open hardware as a viable path for protocol offload in embedded systems.