Icepi Zero Brings FPGA Power to Hobbyists

It seems like microcontrollers are a dime a dozen these days (and sometimes they literally are!), as they are found in the vast majority of an electronics hobbyist’s weekend projects. But there is also another entire world out there, for those that make the effort to understand it. FPGAs are reconfigurable circuits that, for certain applications, can blow microcontrollers out of the water in terms of performance — especially when it comes to running parallel operations.

Despite their many potential applications, FPGAs are lightly used by hobbyists. This is, in large part, because the chips, development kits, and software toolchains out there have primarily been designed with the professional developer in mind. So in addition to being something less than user-friendly, these tools also tend to be on the expensive side. As such, if you are not working with FPGAs day in and day out at work, it is an area that is very difficult to jump into.

A handful of efforts have arisen over the years to build hobbyist-friendly FPGA development platforms, and some of them have been quite good. But as someone with a bunch of these boards in a drawer, I know that if the project isn’t done right, the hardware will become a paperweight in no time. The latest entry into the field comes from hardware hacker Chengyin Yao, who wanted to build a low-cost, easy-to-use FPGA platform that would avoid these problems. The result is the Icepi Zero. Whether it will remain useful for years to come, or be relegated to the drawer of shame, remains to be seen, but the device looks quite promising.

As you might be able to guess from the board’s name, it borrows the form factor of the Raspberry Pi Zero. But there is no Broadcom SoC to be found on the Icepi Zero — instead you will find a powerful Lattice ECP5U FPGA with 24K LUTs and 112 KiB of RAM. The board also has 256MiB of 166MHz SDRAM and 128Mbit of flash memory to extend the system’s capabilities. It also has some good I/O options with three USB-C ports, an HDMI output, a MicroSD card slot, and some programmable LEDs and buttons.

This is all well and good, but will it become a brick in a year or two? It doesn’t look like it. The Icepi Zero comes equipped with a USB to JTAG converter that simplifies the process of programming the chip. Aside from that, the platform relies on well-established open source tools like Yosys for Verilog synthesis, nextpnr for placing and routing, and openFPGALoader for loading the bitstream.

The Icepi Zero looks like it could be a winner, however, it might be a while before you can get your hands on one. A Crowd Supply campaign will be launching soon, but no official timeline has been published just yet. The price is also uncertain, but based on Yao's past comments, it is likely to be somewhere around $30 to $40. Sign up for updates and check back in with Hackster News if you want to stay in the know.