This is a board with RP2040, and FPGA. Github page[0] has more details.
They only refer to FPGA as "1120 LUT FPGA". It is Renesas SLG47910 "ForgeFPGA". It comes from free (free-as-a-beer) toolchain from Renesas.
The board price is good, and I can see it useful for educational tool. I can see why Vicharak, with the goal of "to break free from the shackles of traditional CPU platforms by introducing Reconfigurable Computing to consumers." would sell something like this.
But the FPGA is connected by 6 pins only, so not really for high speed. And RP2040 has it's own PIO peripherals, which can do many of the same tasks that FPGAs can do, while being much simpler to program (and having fast MCU memory access too). I don't really see many real-life task where one would want to use that architecture.
I think they have done a tradeoff of affordability for students vs high speed and real task ability.
Electronics Engineering is in pretty bad shape in India,very few colleges in Indias have equipped labs that provide them the required skills, so having a $4 FPGA really helps in understanding it, conducting small experiments will help in developing a insight on how it works.
Vicharak has higher grade offerings as well which you can check that will be more in line with your exepectations, for eg: Axon, https://vicharak.in/axon
theamk•3mo ago
They only refer to FPGA as "1120 LUT FPGA". It is Renesas SLG47910 "ForgeFPGA". It comes from free (free-as-a-beer) toolchain from Renesas.
The board price is good, and I can see it useful for educational tool. I can see why Vicharak, with the goal of "to break free from the shackles of traditional CPU platforms by introducing Reconfigurable Computing to consumers." would sell something like this.
But the FPGA is connected by 6 pins only, so not really for high speed. And RP2040 has it's own PIO peripherals, which can do many of the same tasks that FPGAs can do, while being much simpler to program (and having fast MCU memory access too). I don't really see many real-life task where one would want to use that architecture.
[0] https://github.com/vicharak-in/shrike-lite
girdhar92•3mo ago
Electronics Engineering is in pretty bad shape in India,very few colleges in Indias have equipped labs that provide them the required skills, so having a $4 FPGA really helps in understanding it, conducting small experiments will help in developing a insight on how it works.
Vicharak has higher grade offerings as well which you can check that will be more in line with your exepectations, for eg: Axon, https://vicharak.in/axon