Technology is becoming more complex every day. Devices get smaller, integration gets higher. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly harder to understand how modern devices work.

In the 80s, you could open your PC and start probing signals on the mainboard to understand which instruction the CPU executed. These days, pretty much everything can be integrated into a single chip and everything is hidden away. One example of such a highly integrated component is the field programmable gate array (FPGA).

FPGAs essentially allow the designer to create large digital designs inside of an IC without having to create actual new silicon. As these designs are created by writing software-like source code, one might easily forget the fact that what is created is, indeed, a digital circuit. The immense overhead to provide this flexibility is easy to underestimate when working with these devices.

To aid students learning about FPGAs better understand the technology, this project aims to provide a platform to look at the inner workings of such a chip by breaking it out of the IC and bringing it onto a PCB where every signal can be traced and measured. Such projects are often done for central processing units (CPUs), but there isn't much when it comes to FPGAs.

Read more on https://notsyncing.net/?p=blog&b=2019.ttl-fpga.