96boards HiKey

Overview

The HiKey board is one of the first 96boards Consumer Edition compliant single-board computers, manufactured by LeMaker in collaboration with Linaro and HiSilicon. It features the HiSilicon Kirin 620 system-on-chip with eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 1.2 GHz, making it a capable platform for Android development, Linux-based projects, and embedded computing. The board conforms to the 96boards CE standard, ensuring compatibility with a growing ecosystem of expansion boards and accessories known as mezzanine boards.

Hardware Specifications

The Kirin 620 SoC integrates an octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU cluster, a Mali-450 MP4 GPU, and a dual-ISP camera subsystem. The board is available in 1 GB and 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM configurations, both paired with 8 GB eMMC 4.5 onboard storage. Connectivity includes WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.1 via a TI WL1835MOD module. Display output is provided through a full-size HDMI 1.4a connector supporting up to 1080p resolution. Two USB 2.0 host ports and one micro-USB OTG port handle peripheral connectivity. A microSD card slot provides expandable storage.

96boards Form Factor

The 96boards Consumer Edition specification defines a standard board size of 85mm × 54mm with fixed positions for power input, USB, HDMI, and expansion connectors. The HiKey includes both the low-speed expansion header (40-pin) and the high-speed expansion header (60-pin). The low-speed header provides GPIO, I2C, SPI, UART, and power pins. The high-speed header adds MIPI DSI for displays, MIPI CSI for cameras, USB host signals, and additional I2C buses. This standardisation allows mezzanine boards designed for any 96boards CE platform to work with the HiKey.

UEFI Boot and Firmware

The HiKey uses a UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) boot flow, which is more sophisticated than the U-Boot bootloader used on many ARM boards. The firmware consists of ARM Trusted Firmware (ATF) for secure boot, UEFI for the boot manager, and GRUB as the bootloader for Linux. Firmware updates are performed through the board's recovery mode using the fastboot protocol. Set the boot mode switches on the board to enter recovery mode, connect the micro-USB OTG port to a host computer, and use fastboot flash commands to update each firmware partition individually.

Flashing Operating Systems

The HiKey supports multiple operating systems. For Debian Linux, download the official Linaro builds from the 96boards downloads page. Flash the boot, system, and userdata partitions using fastboot: fastboot flash boot boot.img, fastboot flash system rootfs.img. For Android (AOSP), flash the complete set of Android partition images including boot, system, vendor, userdata, and cache. After flashing, set the boot switches back to normal mode and power cycle the board. The system should boot to the desktop or Android launcher within 30 to 60 seconds.

Supported Operating Systems

The HiKey officially supports Debian Linux builds maintained by Linaro with regular kernel and security updates. Android Open Source Project (AOSP) builds are also available, making the HiKey an excellent platform for Android application and system-level development. Community-maintained builds include Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenEmbedded. The Debian builds include a full desktop environment accessible via HDMI, while server builds optimise for headless operation. Choose the operating system based on your development target and performance requirements.

Development with Linaro Toolchain

For native development on the HiKey, install the GCC compiler and development tools with sudo apt-get install build-essential. For cross-compilation from a more powerful host, use the Linaro aarch64 toolchain available from the Linaro releases page. The HiKey is well-supported by the Linaro developer community, with extensive documentation, automated test frameworks through LAVA (Linaro Automated Validation Architecture), and regular builds of the latest upstream kernel. The 96boards GitHub organisation hosts reference implementations, sample applications, and hardware test suites for the HiKey platform.

Expansion and Peripherals

The 96boards mezzanine ecosystem provides a variety of expansion options for the HiKey. The Sensors Mezzanine board adds Grove connectors for easy sensor integration. The Audio Mezzanine provides high-quality audio I/O. For custom hardware, the low-speed expansion header exposes two I2C buses, one SPI bus, and multiple GPIO lines that can be accessed from Linux user space through the standard sysfs interface or through libraries such as libmraa and libupm maintained by the 96boards community.

Related Pages

For the next-generation HiKey board, see HiKey960. Product information and purchasing are available at LeMaker Home.

Author: LeMaker Documentation Team
Last updated: 2026-02-10