>The barrier to entry in the FPGA world is tooling and expression. Re: tooling, both major vendors of FPGAs have free basic versions of their tools (e.g. Xilin

>The barrier to entry in the FPGA world is tooling and expression. Re: tooling, both major vendors of FPGAs have free basic versions of their tools (e.g. Xilinx's Vivado and ISE Webpack) and supported development boards are available for $99 or less (e.g. Digilent's Arty Board). Re: expression, both Verilog and VHDL permit gate level modeling. Verilog even has gates as language primitives.