Cheap FPGA Development Boards
Unfortunately, cost of the development boards is in no way the problem blocking wider use and knowledge of FPGAs.<p>FPGA tooling is stuck in the dark ages. FPGA pipelines are windows-only, the development environment UIs look like a toddler was given access to VB6, and the licensing is crazy.<p>Lattice semiconductor will give a free licence for iceCube2  to a resident of the USA in less then 24 hours but will deliberate for weeks over giving one to someone in Australia (so you should just lie and say you live at the white house, that&#x27;s what I did after three weeks of no response to my licence request).<p>Xilinx&#x27;s free licence for ISE states that by using the free licence you agree to let ISE upload all your FPGA code to them and they get to use it for whatever they want. It actually states directly in the licence that if you don&#x27;t like that you should install the software and then airgap the computer from the internet forever. Cheeky as hell in my opinion. I installed mine on a virtualbox machine and then removed the virtual network card.<p>The reality is, FPGA manufacture and tooling is stuck where 3d printing was a decade ago, but for slightly different reasons. Designing and manufacturing FPGAs is pretty high investment which is a major barrier to entry for competitors (the same way patents was for 3d printers). Since FPGAs are desirable for many high end tech companies, it&#x27;s more profitable for Lattice&#x2F;Xilinx&#x2F;et al to charge a small number of companies a squillion dollars for high end development boards and commercial software licences than it is for them to lower the barriers of entry and sell to a wider audience.<p>I&#x27;d put a lot of support behind an open hardware FPGA design, even if it was rather shitty in performance, cost and&#x2F;or features to the current top of the line FPGAs.