Ask HN: How does one get involved in FPGA development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does one get involved in FPGA development?

15 pointsmeifun16 comments

How does one get started with FPGA development in 2025? I have code that runs on my MacBook and I met a trader who suggested I get my code running on FPGA hardware. He didn't know how exactly to get started.

What is a viable path in very late 2025 for a hobbyist to get started?

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I started down this path a few months ago. Here's a few links I've collected that have been useful

- https://nandgame.com/

- https://www.asic-world.com/verilog/verilog_one_day.html

- https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Problem_sets

- https://edaplayground.com/home

I would also recommend this book: https://nostarch.com/gettingstartedwithfpgas

And it's associated starter FPGA: https://nandland.com/the-go-board/

If you outgrow this I would recommend moving to some sort of Xilinx Arty Spartan board

Many thanks

Since using an FPGA requires designing hardware at the logic gate level, the realistic answer is to get a computer engineering degree or the equivalent self-study. The HDLs (Hardware Description Language) used to specify these circuits may superficially resemble a programming language but they really, really aren't.

You can get a rough idea of what you're getting into by going through the NAND2Tetris self-learning course ( https://www.nand2tetris.org/ ) and the associated textbook The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles. But that's just scratching the bare surface of the depth you'd need to go to to get useful acceleration.

That doesn't even go into the eyewatering cost of the development tools and professional FPGA boards. There are free versions of the tools and small FPGA boards intended for student and hobbyist use but, assuming your code is non-trivial, they're unlikely to get you any significant speed up.

Thanks. The idea of another degree could be interesting.

If you go this route, major in electrical engineering, not computer engineering. you will get more out of it

I worked for a company that made dedicated FPGA based hardware for high frequency trading by deep-pocketed customers. You can certainly implement trading strategies running directly on the board with crazy fast turnaround times, but if a retail trader could benefit from them we all would have quit our jobs and become independent high frequency traders. Interestingly, at that point the Linux network stack becomes a bottleneck so you'll want to go for a proprietary alternative whose name I don't remember any more (not cheap), which I imagine might also apply to a Mac, but that's neither here nor there unless you have a server in close physical proximity to the exchange. Meta-advice: If you want to learn about FPGAs as a matter of interest, more power to you. Otherwise, skip the bikeshedding and learn enough about financial markets to find a niche where you might have an edge.

I bought a cheap Sipeed Tang Nano 9K FPGA Development Board (Gowin GW1NR-9 RISC-V HDMI) for $24 last year via Amazon. I ended up using Yosys[1] as a toolchain for programing, instead of the one from the manufacturer, code/program it. I had a lot of fun.

[1] https://yosyshq.net/yosys/

Take a look at https://old.reddit.com/r/FPGA/

Whatever people may say about reddit, it seems to be a good starting point to get started with pretty much any hobby (even if it's just to get a link to another community).

Edit: https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga looks interesting.

Thank you for the links

> I met a trader who suggested I get my code running on FPGA hardware. He didn't know how exactly to get started.

Did he say why? It's hard to see what the motive for this is.

FPGAs are widely used in low latency trading. Most market data feed handlers and order passing adapters are done in FPGAs today - they offer better latency than software solutions and processing time is deterministic.

One example of a company offering something like that: https://www.enyx.com/

It highly depends on what you're doing, but in trading there is very often a direct reliationship between latency and how much money you can make.

He said because it allows for parallel processing, faster execution for realtime processing.

I suppose if you are literally only bound by processor speed it might help. But bringing it all together into a working system will take some effort. Had you considered offloading to GPUs instead?

What would you plug this FPGA into? Where will you trade? How much more will you make thanks to the FPGA's lower latency?

Own an FPGA(?)

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