n6 carrier board.
a custom 60×45 mm STM32N657 carrier board. icarus's flight computer, currently in schematic capture.
this is my first board around ST's NPU-class N6: a compact carrier that sits in a drone stack and will eventually fly. right now it's in schematic capture.
the N6 is not a forgiving part to carry. it has no internal user flash at all, so external memory and a boot flow are mandatory from day one, and the core needs a proper PMIC rather than a couple of LDOs. most of the design time goes into the power tree and the boot architecture.
what's on it
- mcu STM32N657X0H3Q, Cortex-M55 at 800 MHz with the ST Neural-ART NPU, VFBGA264.
- power STPMIC2 power tree carrying every rail the N6 asks for.
- camera MIPI CSI interface for the vision pipeline.
- stack interface 3× Hirose DF40 connectors so the flight-controller module plugs in from below.
- peripherals USB, UART, debug, status, and sensor connections split across their own schematic sheets.
where it stands
the schematics are split by function: the STPMIC2 power tree, the MCU sheet with its decoupling, the camera interface, peripherals, and the DF40 stack connector pinout. layout starts once the schematics close.