The surge of interest appears to have killed Lattice Semi's website. Anyway, this is a fancy breakout board for a tiny BGA device: ice40UL1K. Available in single quantities from Digikey for under $2.
I feel like its about time Lattice got some attention. Their development environment is way nicer for enthusiasts and it's usually pretty easy to use their stuff in projects. Xilinx by comparison only has free IDE support for some mid range SOCs (Zynq-7000) which tend to cost a lot on their own and the IDE is a living nightmare to use.
can anyone recommend a good FPGA development kit to get started? I'm ultimately interested in SDR (dsp) and possibly finance applications, and would like to get familiar with the dev tools as I work on some hobby projects.
The most restrictive thing about this to me is the pinout. Only 6 I/Os really limits the applications in terms of SerDes / parallel-to-serial applications as well as in terms of configurable pinout, which is (IMO) where small programmable logic really shines. In my experience microcontrollers are cheaper and easier for pretty much any kind of the simple serial/processing stuff you could handle with such a small logic device.
In my opinion 1K LUTs is fine for a lot of cool applications - I built an ((E)EP)ROM / RAM simulator out of an iCEBlink40HX1K board to use in programming and reversing old ECUs. It works great and is vastly superior to the old school method of doing this (hardware dual port SRAM) since the pinout is configurable on the fly.
I was just wondering how many logic gates it takes to get to certain milestones. Is there a table somewhere saying feature vs. logic gate count? You seem knowledgeable, and the last FPGA I played with was a cyclone II.
I remember the first PLD I used had 32 macrocells (in about 1991/1992). I could just about fit a single, simple state machine on it for talking to the VME bus.
I had not seen that device before, but I am going to buy some now.
The use case is for applications that require complex logic but do not require the overhead of a full-blown microprocessor. I could use this bugger in place of an MSP430 in the automatic pool leveller and barbecue temperature control devices I am (eventually) building.
1K LUTs with 5 I/O's, My thought was an RGB LED controller with an i2c bus but that is already available in hard logic. You could probably do the motor sequencing bit for a motor controller in it, doing i2c for reading the position sensors. But mostly I run up against pin limitations. I'd like it to have 12 I/Os rather than 5 presumably Lattice provides that too. Then its a replacement for the CoolRunner CPLDs.
I'm not sure what you'd do with this; at 1k LUTs you could probably just about fit an 8-bit microprocessor in there. Could you do crypto? You could get one or two AES implementations in: http://www.chesworkshop.org/ches2003/presentations/chodowiec...