Featuring the quad-core Allwinner H618, the BPI-CM7 is a low-profile compute module with onboard LPDDR4 memory, eMMC storage, Wi-Fi 5, and Bluetooth 5.0. The module uses two 100-pin board-to-board connectors and is designed to work with Banana Pi’s BPI-CM7IO carrier board, which provides access to multiple peripheral interfaces.

The Allwinner H618 has previously appeared in boards including Sipeed’s Longan Pi 3H, the Avaota C1 and Banana Pi’s BPI-M4 Zero. The SoC integrates four 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 1.5GHz alongside an Arm Mali-G31 GPU.

The BPI-CM7 measures approximately 55 × 40mm and connects to a carrier board through two 100-pin board-to-board connectors.

Allwinner H618 block diagram

The published module layout images show a configuration with 2GB of LPDDR4 and 32GB of eMMC storage, along with a 256-byte EEPROM. Banana Pi’s documentation states that memory and eMMC capacities depend on the product configuration.

Banana Pi BPI-CM7 top view

The two 100-pin connectors expose HDMI, Fast Ethernet, USB, microSD and a range of general-purpose interfaces. These include GPIO, UART, TWI/I2C, SPI, PWM, I2S/PCM, DMIC, SPDIF and infrared signals, with power supplied through a 5V input.

USB support consists of one USB 2.0 OTG interface and three USB 2.0 host interfaces. The module also exposes an HDMI display output and 10/100Mbps Ethernet through the board-to-board connectors.

The module also includes a K019-CW43-Dw wireless module providing Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity with an external antenna connector.

Banana Pi BPI-CM7 bottom view

Banana Pi has also documented the companion BPI-CM7IO carrier board, although it has not published images of the board. The carrier is described as providing USB Type-C power and USB 2.0 OTG, two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, HDMI, 10/100Mbps Ethernet, a microSD slot and a 40-pin GPIO header.

Additional interfaces include a mini-PCIe-style socket connected over USB 2.0, a SIM card slot, UART debug header, reset and FEL buttons, and a four-pin header for composite video and stereo line output.

Banana Pi BPI-CM7

Software support includes Android and Linux. Banana Pi documents an Armbian 24.11.1 Jammy image based on Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS with a Linux 5.4.125 legacy sunxi64 kernel. Its published test results show the quad-core Cortex-A53 processor running at up to 1.512GHz, approximately 1.9GiB of usable memory and a 29.3GiB eMMC device on the tested 2GB/32GB configuration.

Specifications listed for the Banana Pi BPI-CM7 include:

• Processor:
  • Allwinner H618
  • 4x Arm Cortex-A53, up to 1.5GHz
  • Arm Mali-G31 GPU
• Memory:
  • Onboard LPDDR4
• Storage:
  • Onboard eMMC
  • microSD interface
• Display:
  • HDMI output
• Networking:
  • 10/100Mbps Ethernet
  • Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0
• USB:
  • 1x USB 2.0 OTG
  • 3x USB 2.0 host
• Expansion:
  • GPIO, PWM
  • TWI/I2C, SPI , UART
  • I2S/PCM
  • DMIC, SPDIF
  • IR
• Power:
  • 5V input
• Mechanical:
  • ~55 × 40mm (SoM)
  • 2x 100-pin board-to-board connectors

Further Information

Banana Pi has published documentation for both the BPI-CM7 compute module and BPI-CM7IO carrier board. Pricing and availability were not provided at the time of writing.