Sipeed’s Lichee PI 4A based on T-HEAD TH1520 SoC

The LicheePi4A is a high-performance RISC-V SBC based on TH1520(4xC910@1.85GHz), comes with 4/8/16 GB RAM, and up to 128GB eMMC, and rich peripherals.

  • SoC T-HEAD TH1520 SoC

  • System Memory 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB LPDDR4X

  • Storage eMMC flash with 8/32/128 GB

  • external microSD slot

  • Networking 2x Gigabit Ethernet

  • WiFi+BT

  • Display HDMI2.0, 4-lane MIPI DSI

  • Camera 4-lane MIPI CSI + 2x2-lane MIPI CSI

  • Audio Onboard Speaker, 2xMEMS MIC, 3.5mm headphone jack

  • USB 4xUSB3.0 Type-A, 1xUSB2.0 Type-C

  • GPIO 2x10Pin breakout, UART/IIC/SPI

  • Power DC 12V/2A, POE 5V/2.4A, USB Type-C 5V/2A

TH1520 RISC-V SoC

The TH1520 SoC consist of quad-core RISC-V Xuantie C910 (RV64GCV) processor, Xuantie C906 audio DSP, low power Xuantie E902 core, it also integrate Imagination GPU for graphics, and 4 TOPS NPU for AI acceleration.

Mainline support

The support for following drivers are already enabled:

  1. ns16550 UART Driver.

  2. eMMC and SD card

Building

  1. Add the RISC-V toolchain to your PATH.

  2. Setup ARCH & cross compilation environment variable:

export CROSS_COMPILE=<riscv64 toolchain prefix>

  1. Build DDR firmware

DDR driver requires a firmware to function, to build it:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ziyao233/th1520-firmware
cd th1520-firmware
lua5.4 ddr-generate.lua src/<CONFIGURATION_NAME>.lua th1520-ddr-firmware.bin

  1. Build OpenSBI Firmware

TH1520 port of proper U-Boot runs in S mode, thus OpenSBI is required as SBI firmware to setup S-mode environment and provide SBI calls. It could be cloned and built for TH1520 as below,

git clone https://github.com/riscv-software-src/opensbi.git
cd opensbi
make PLATFORM=generic

TH1520 support in OpenSBI requires v1.2 or a more recent version.

More detailed description of steps required to build fw_dynamic firmware is beyond the scope of this document. Please refer to OpenSBI documenation.

  1. Build U-Boot images

The DDR firmware should be copied to U-Boot source directory before building.

cd <U-Boot-dir>
cp <path-to-ddr-firmware> th1520-ddr-firmware.bin
make th1520_lpi4a_defconfig
make OPENSBI=<opensbi_dir>/build/platform/generic/firmware/fw_dynamic.bin

This will generate u-boot-with-spl.bin, which contains SPL, DDR firmware, OpenSBI firmware and proper U-Boot.

Booting

u-boot-with-spl.bin should be loaded to SRAM through fastboot. Connect the board to computer with Type-C cable and run

fastboot flash ram u-boot-with-spl.bin
fastboot reboot

Sample boot log from Lichee PI 4A board via fastboot

[APP][E] protocol_connect failed, exit.
Starting download of 940681 bytes

downloading of 940681 bytes finished

U-Boot SPL 2025.07-rc3-00005-g3a0ef515b8bb (May 29 2025 - 10:42:46 +0000)
Trying to boot from RAM


U-Boot 2025.07-rc3-00005-g3a0ef515b8bb (May 29 2025 - 10:42:46 +0000)

CPU:   thead,c910
Model: Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A
DRAM:  8 GiB
Core:  110 devices, 9 uclasses, devicetree: separate
MMC:   mmc@ffe7080000: 0, mmc@ffe7090000: 1
Loading Environment from <NULL>... OK
In:    serial@ffe7014000
Out:   serial@ffe7014000
Err:   serial@ffe7014000
Model: Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A
LPI4A=>