Vicharak Sets the Shrike Aflight, Promises Low-Cost FPGA Development on a Renesas ForgeFPGA
Breadboard-friendly design comes with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller linked to the ForgeFPGA over a six-bit bridge.
Indian programmable computing specialist Vicharak has unveiled a lower-cost, more compact alternative to its Vaaman "reconfigurable edge computer:" the Shrike, which hosts a Renesas ForgeFPGA chip alongside a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller on a breadboard-friendly development board.
"Shrike FPGA is a compact, open-source development board that pairs the RP2040 microcontroller with the Renesas ForgeFPGA, enabling you to build powerful custom logic systems, educational experiments, and real-world hardware interfaces," says Vicharak's Akshar Vastarpara of the board. "It includes fully open documentation and a USB Type-C port for programming and power. Whether you're a student, educator, embedded developer, or just curious about FPGAs, Shrike gives you an elegant, low-cost platform you can use to dive into the world of reconfigurable computing."
The board is built around the Renesas ForgeFPGA SLG47910V field-programmable gate array with 1,120 look-up tables (LUTs), linked to a Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller via a six-bit high-speed bridge. There's a quad-SPI link to external flash for the microcontroller, while the RP2040 is linked to 23 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins and the ForgeFPGA to 14 GPIO pins plus a PMOD expansion connector; both get their own user-programmable LED for status notifications.
The Shrike comes around a year and a half after Vicharak opened crowdfunding for its Vaaman "reconfigurable edge computer," which failed to reach its funding goal but entered production anyway back in April. The Shrike's specifications are considerably lower than its predecessor, which boasts an application-class Rockchip RK3399 six-core system-on-chip and an Efinix Trion T120 FPGA with 112,128 logic elements, but that should also be reflected in the price — as-yet unannounced.
More information is available on the Shrike Crowd Supply campaign page, where interested parties can sign up to be notified when it goes live. The company has promised that the board's design and firmware, which includes a MicroPython-based tool for programming the FPGA, will be released under an unspecified open source license "after the campaign closes."