The AUCTUS A6: the chip enabling inexpensive DMR Radio (2021)

Summary

The AUCTUS A6 is the chip behind the inexpensive COTRE CO01D DMR radio. There isn’t much information available on the web. Here is what I was able to find. While looking at the the COTRE CO01D radio, it is clear that this radio has a very low part count in comparison to other simple DMR radios. For example, the RT53 DMR radio has separate microcontroller, DSP and RF ICs. I noticed that there is only a single IC that seems to be powering everything, the mystery Auctus A6. The company behind this chip is Auctus Technology(力同科技股份有限公司) out of Shenzhen. This company might be familiar to some radio enthusiasts as the company behind the AT1846S RF transceiver which powers the Baofeng UV-5r. They are company specializing in RF chips and while their current web page displays nothing but a landing page, the Internet Archive provides some information of their complete lineup of products. They manufacture devices under both their own mark as well as contracted devices for others such as RDA. According to this Chinese news site, the Auctus A6 is an integrated CPU, RF transceiver, DSP and vocoder. Their vision is to do what the AT1846S did for analog handheld radios for DMR radios. The CPU is a dual core 32-bit RISC processor of unknown design. It is coupled with 2-8 MB of psRAM(pseudostatic RAM) and 8 MB of flash. The CPU has sufficient I/O to handle everything a normal microcontroller would in a radio including GPIO for switches, I2C and SPI for communicating with other devices, UART and USB for communicating with a computer. Special sections for driving LEDs, an LCD display and a keypad. Additionally, it has an camera I/O section, SD card slot and an I2S interface. The RF section includes a VHF/UHF transceiver capable of operating between 100-1000 MHz. While additional details are not specified, we know it can operate using both analog and digital modes. They specify that the channels can be 6.25/12.5/25/200 kHz in width. The 200kHz is for some sort of data transmission, maybe...