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Comment by TomVDB | Hacker News Reader

For those looking for cheap FPGA boards, I highly recommend looking for something that is based on the Lattice ICE40. The cheapest board you can find is probably the $9 Upduino, though trickier to get going. (Complete lack of documentation.)

But there are tons of hobby boards in existence.

The best part is Project IceStorm, a fully open source tool flow, from synthesis to bitstream. While not the best in terms of optimization, it's killer feature is that it's blazing fast. You can get small design synthesized and converted to a place-and-routed bitstream in under a minute.

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I’d highly recommend the IceStick for $21 - not only do you get an FPGA but it has an ft2232, so you have a serial adapter and basic JTAG adapter for free!

I’d keep one on my keychain if I could (it’s a tad too large).

PSoCs are nice, too. They're not full blown FPGAs, but you can experiment with Verilog pretty easily.

My problem (years ago) was that with Lattice, there just aren't as many tutorials/easy-EDA and they kind of expect you to know what you're doing.

So if you've never taken a class on FPGA's and learned how netlists work, et al, Lattice may be a harder time. I ended up buying a cheap Altera afterward just to learn.

I think that's solved now though, at least for a few ICs and toolchains, via things like MyHDL and/or rhea (tldr; Python wrappers) and websites like fpga4fun.com

I entirely see where you're coming from, and this has completely changed in the last 2-3 years. SiliconBlue/Lattice used to be a niche-market low-power also ran in the FPGA world. Documentation was sparse and most examples from academia targeted Altera or Xilinx parts.

The open-source toolchain flipped this and allowed Lattice FPGAs to become the tool of choice for beginners and small-application hobbyists. There's now a tremendous wealth of resource available around getting started with Lattice FPGAs. And as the cherry on top, you don't have to wrangle the gigantic Vivado/Quartus/ISE suites to do so.

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