Upbeat Technology has announced the UP201 and UP301 family of RISC-V microcontrollers developed in collaboration with SiFive. The devices are intended for applications such as always-on IoT, wearables, drones, and sensor-based systems.

The UP201 and UP301 integrate two SiFive Essential IP cores and two neural accelerators designed by Upbeat Technology. They implement Upbeat’s Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) architecture and near-threshold operation to improve energy efficiency. Power consumption is specified at 16.8 µW/MHz/DMIPS, with clock frequencies up to 400 MHz and 717 DMIPS of performance.

The platform includes two RISC-V cores: an E21 lightweight core operating in the Always-On (AON) domain and an E34 performance core in the Non-AON domain. The AON core manages continuous low-power sensing, while the second core activates for higher workloads.

According to Upbeat Technology, this arrangement enables near-instant wake-up and reduces energy use by up to 65 percent compared to conventional microcontrollers.

UP201/UP301 Coremark Power Consumption 

Each device incorporates two NPUs that handle both always-on inference and compute-intensive AI workloads. The AON domain NPU performs low-power inference tasks such as voice or motion detection, while the second NPU processes more demanding operations like speaker identification or biosignal analysis. A 32-bit integer math accelerator supports real-time signal processing and control tasks.

The SoC includes a Root-of-Trust subsystem with a PUF, TRNG, and 8 Kb of OTP storage. Hardware-based cryptographic engines provide AES-256, SHA-256, and SM4 algorithm support, along with secure boot capabilities for data protection.

UP201/UP301 Power Efficiency 

The UP201 is a compact AI SoC (3×3 mm WLCSP) designed for power-limited systems such as sensor hubs and wearables. The UP301 (5×5 mm FCCSP) adds camera input, MIPI-DSI-2 display support, and expanded I/O for higher-performance designs such as AR glasses and robotics.

Both share the same dual-core architecture and NPUs but differ in I/O configuration, storage interfaces, and multimedia capabilities.

Trina Pi Peripherals

The Trina-Pi board provides a prototyping platform for the UP201 microcontroller. Measuring 33×61 mm, it includes the UP201 MCU, FT2232HP USB bridge, NOR Flash, power management ICs, GPIO headers, and reset and programming pushbuttons.

A USB Type-C interface supports development through an SDK that includes example projects for neural inference, control tasks, and display rendering using the integrated GFX 2.5D GPU and LVGL library.

Further Information

According to the official press release, engineering samples and the Trina-Pi SDK are available, along with datasheets and reference designs from Upbeat Technology. The company will also demonstrate the Trina-Pi development board running a keyword spotting (KWS) application during the RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara, California, on October 22–23, 2025.