Lattice ECP5
Lattice ECP5 is currently my favorite FPGA.
It is at the low end of the market, but has a lot of great functionality. First of all it supports 1080p (1920 * 1080) DVI out at 60 frames per second. ICE40 and GateMate cannot do that. Also it supports SDRAM as video frame buffers at the same 1080p @60FPS rate. This involveds DDR3 800Transactions/s.
It is an older chip, so it supports 3.3 V I/O, as well as lots of other voltages. That makes it easy to interface to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. In contrast, GateMate and Lattice's NX17/33/40 need level shifters to connect to RPI chips which adds cost, size and complexity to circuit boards
Since it is an older chip, it supports LVDS with 7:1 gearing, which I need for the Sony Block Camera with 30 x physical zoom.
ULX3S. View
ULX3S has had a great reputation for many years.
It is for the educational market. It has many permipherals, and comes in three different sizes. When I first started studying FPGAS in 2022 it was the board that everyone recommended. It is still a great choice, although there are now less expensive options with fewer peripherals.
IcePi Zero. View
The IcePi Zero is an excellent example of an application specific FPGA circuit board.
The board designer wanted a board to run soft cpu cores. It has all that is needed for a soft core, the rest it leaves to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. This makes for a small and inexpensive board. $64 = € 54 the same prices as the Olimex GateMate with 2 external RAMs, but Icepi has a lot more bang for the buck.
It has DVI out, a fast SDRAM, two USB ports for the. keyboard and mouse, an SD card reader, and a USB port to connect to the desktop. Everything else it leaves to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem, which is easy to plug into since it has the Raspberry Pi form factor. Lattice ECP5 is an older chip, it still supports 3.3V peripherals, which is perfect for interfacing to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem: no level shifters are needed.
The designer scratched his own itch, and in the process perfectly targeted the market. There are not many trained FPGA developers, but there are a lot of software developers who want to become FPGA developers. Their first project is usually a soft CPU core. So they want a board like this. I did the same thing for my master's thesis in electrical engineering. In the process I learned that soft cores on FPGAs are so much slower than dedicated chips. For the FPGA to be competitive, it needs a much more parallel application, which is why I moved to video. processing.
While the high level design is perfect, I worry was that there will be bugs in this board. This is the first board the designer built. Since it is an open source board, a lot of experts gave him advice, but still mistakes could have been made. And indeed that happened. The first batch of boards were received on December 17th, 2025, two of the pins were reversed, and on Jan 1 2026 version 1.3 of the board was released. So if you are doing mainstream soft cpu cores you should now be fine, but for people like me who are doing something non mainstream, there is still a worry that there will be problems with the details.
Because this board is so small and simple, it is easy to modify it. There is already a pull request for a variant with an Analog. to Digital Converter (ADC).