TRtranspute·Jun 24, 2025
Some contributors to the open hardware community (https://fossi-foundation.org/events/archive) can be followed on social media. See videos from FOSSI conferences and comments in these HN threads:
2023, "FPGA Dev Boards for $150 or Less", 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38161215
2021, "FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain", 70 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25720531
Not an FPGA, but if you already have a recent Ryzen device, the AMD NPU might be worth a look, with Xilinx lineage and current AI/LLM market frenzy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671940
> The Versal AI Engine is the NPU. And the Ryzen CPUs NPU is almost exactly a Versal AI Engine IP block to the point that in the Linux kernel they share the same driver (amdxdna) and the reference material the kernel docs
Read the rest
link to for the Ryzen NPUs is the Versal SoC's AI Engine architecture reference manual.
At one point, cheap ex-miner FPGAs were on eBay, https://hackaday.com/2020/12/10/a-xilinx-zynq-linux-fpga-boa.... The Zynq (Arm + Xilinx FPGA) dev board is around $200, https://www.avnet.com/americas/products/avnet-boards/avnet-b.... There was an M.2 Xilinx FPGA (PicoEVB) that conveniently fit into a laptop for portable development, but it's not sold anymore. PCIe FPGAs are used for DMA security testing, some of those boards are available, https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech-fpga