For all the hackers out there who have been wanting to get into playing with FPGAs but have been daunted by the tens of gigabytes of downloads for the IDEs and having to download and agree to restrictive licenses: seek no more! The Pico-Ice microcontroller/FPGA development board has you covered with quality hardware at a low price, as well as excellent, fully open-source software/HDL toolchains to develop with!
The designer, tinyVision.ai, has experience when it comes to producing and supporting FPGA development boards. Their Upduino FPGA boards have a very good reputation, and they have an active Discord server with a great community ready to help newcomers.
Adding an RP2040 to the mix enables some truly powerful hardware to be made with this little board — the included iCE40 Lattice FPGA has five thousand macrocells; it’s not a monster 100k-cell chip but you can do a lot with what they’ve provided. Plus, Lattice chips have excellent documentation and the open-source toolchain means you don’t have to contend with huge, unwieldy proprietary software.
The features packed onto this nano-sized board are impressive: separate 4Mb flash chips for the RP2040 and iCE40, an 8Mb SRAM for the FPGA, 2×40 pin headers with all pins of both chips fully broken out, as well as the option of using 4xPMOD headers, opening up a huge number of PMOD-compatible sensor boards that can plug straight in, and last but not least the whole thing is Open Source Hardware Certified!
So if you want to get into FPGA development, or you are already experienced and want a quality, low-cost board to prototype with, the Pico-Ice is an excellent choice!
