Upvote for the iCE40. Last i heard it's one of the only devices to have a fully open source toolchain. I had a good experience learning on altera, and they had

Upvote for the iCE40. Last i heard it's one of the only devices to have a fully open source toolchain. I had a good experience learning on altera, and they had a pretty comprehensive dev environment, but my impression is that every aspect of their "university program" is ultimately geared towards extracting money from people in exchange for use of ip cores regardless of whether it's really appropriate for the users needs. That being said, i can vouch for cheap terasic boards. I might reccommend buying a sub $50 altera board to get over the initial learning curve, and then expanding into less commercially oriented stuff for more complex projects. Edit: the iCE40 is a popular choice at CERN, and you should be able to find materials geared towards young physics grad students and other fpga non-experts.