What is the project about?

Arctyx Nano is a pico-sized, open-source FPGA development board designed to make working with FPGAs more approachable. It’s small enough to fit in your hand, but powerful enough to explore real digital design concepts like parallel logic, hardware timing, and low-level interfaces.

Why did I decide to make it?

I wanted to properly understand FPGAs beyond tutorials and datasheets. Most beginner FPGA boards are either too large, too expensive, or hide important details behind abstraction. Designing my own board forced me to understand everything end-to-end: power regulation, configuration, clocking, pin constraints, and how HDL actually maps onto real hardware.

How does it work?

At its core, Arctyx Nano centers around an FPGA configured using an external programmer(The RP2350A). The board includes the required power regulation, clock source, configuration circuitry, and user I/O in a very compact layout. Once programmed, the FPGA runs user-defined logic written in Verilog or VHDL, allowing direct control over digital signals without a microcontroller in between.

Because everything is exposed at the hardware level, users can experiment with real FPGA concepts like parallel execution, timing constraints, and hardware state machines—things that are difficult to truly grasp using software alone.