If you haven't done FPGA work before, you certainly want to start with something small and cheap - it will keep you busy for a long time learning a completely d

If you haven't done FPGA work before, you certainly want to start with something small and cheap - it will keep you busy for a long time learning a completely different type of development process. Lattice ECP5 is popular with hackers because there is a reasonably well supported open-source tool chain via Yosys. As tempting as an open-source toolchain is, it is NOT friendly for beginners. You can also use the Lattice Diamond software which includes ModelSim for free (it needs a license, but you can get it by registering for free). If you go that route, I really like the Orange Crab dev board https://1bitsquared.com/products/orangecrab https://1bitsquared.com/products/orangecrab. That being said, I really would recommend Xilinx for a beginner. The reason is that the toolchain is the least nightmare-ish and they have by far the best documentation and tutorials. Vivado is also free and contains a good synthesis tool and simulator as well as everything else you need. These are going to be much friendlier to the beginner. Good boards might be: $249 Zybo-Z7 https://digilent.com/shop/zybo-z7-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc-development-board/ https://digilent.com/shop/zybo-z7-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc-dev... or $129 Cora-Z7 https://digilent.com/shop/cora-z7-zynq-7000-single-core-and-dual-core-options-for-arm-fpga-soc-development/ https://digilent.com/shop/cora-z7-zynq-7000-single-core-and-.... Both of these also contain a pretty good dual core ARM9, but if you don't want to mess with the software for the ARM, you can still use the FPGA fabric as a plain FPGA. All of the boards above contain USB based JTAG programmer and require no extra tools for debug and loading. > My understanding is all FPGA toolchains are a nightmare, and I'm guessing I may have to pirate the software, no chance of me affording a $10k-a-seat license Well, FPGA design is different than software. For small and medium-size parts, all the vendors have free or very cheap development tools now. All EDA software is very complex and less standardized than software tools. A lot of that is unavoidable. So certainly the toolchains are extremely challenging to learn. The quality of documentation ranges from pretty good (Xilinx) to useless (Microsemi) with most clustered around bad-to-useless. The tools also crash and misbehave in ways you'd never expect visual studio or GCC to do. But again, some of that is because it's comparably a niche market and because of poor vendor support. But a lot more of it is due to the very different and very complicated job the tools are doing, so try not to get overly frustrated - hardware is several layers deeper than software.