FPGA selection for beginners
I'm not particularly expert on FPGAs, but I feel like sharing some of the thought process and research I did in getting into tinkering with FPGAs to help other people contemplating such things. Why FPGAs? FPGAs are the go-to solution for "digital things that can't be done with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or other microcontroller plus software." If you want more than a handful of discrete digital devices in your project, an FPGA (or its smaller cousin, a CPLD) can be whatever collection of gates you need. From a more industrial perspective, they are a stepping-stone to the kind of large-scale digital design that goes into developing ASICs and high-powered DSP solutions. I'll probably discuss later some of the things that are probably not suited for FPGAs and assume for now you at least understand what they are, what they can do, and you just really, really want to use one. You want to buy an FPGA for good reasons and can't decide which: how to choose? Choo...