As much as I enjoyed working with the PolarFire team when I worked at SiFive, I have to mention their tools really do suck. The first time I used the Libero to

As much as I enjoyed working with the PolarFire team when I worked at SiFive, I have to mention their tools really do suck. The first time I used the Libero tools, it took a week of back and forth w/ support to resolve a license issue. The license activation string that came in the package was just plain wrong and I had to prove to the support people that someone at our firm had actually paid for the board we were using. Aside from that, the tools were klunky, even compared to Xilinx/AMD Vivado. And as best as I can remember, the free license expired after a year. After that you have to pay money for crappy tools. While I love the BeagleBone guys, unless you have a budget to purchase tools from MicroChip that you don't get to learn how much the cost of the tool is until a year later, you may want to consider using a FPGA supported by various open source tools (which are, themselves kind of klunky, but at least you're not paying an arm and a leg.) Yosys + Symbiflow/F4PGA work with the Xilinx/AMD Artix-7 board and iCE40. You may want to pick one of those up if your work-load is FPGA heavy.