About FPGA Guide
What this site is, who it is for, how it is organised, and the rules we hold ourselves to.
FPGA Guide is an independent, vendor-neutral guide to the whole field of field-programmable gate arrays. It is written for working engineers and for students who intend to become working engineers. Its purpose is to be the place you open when you need to understand something about FPGAs properly: the architecture, the languages, the tools, the timing, the interfaces, the boards, and the industry around them.
Who it is for
Three groups, roughly.
- Engineers who already design with FPGAs and want a reliable reference that is not tied to one vendor’s documentation.
- Software and embedded engineers who need to understand enough about FPGAs to work alongside the people who design them, or to decide whether an FPGA belongs in a product.
- Students and self-taught learners who want a structured path from the first LUT to a working SoC design, with code that compiles.
We assume you can read a schematic and have written some code in any language. We do not assume you have used an FPGA before.
How it is organised
| Section | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Learn | Four tracks (beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert) of ordered lessons with diagrams, complete HDL and exercises |
| Topics | One hub per subject, from architecture to careers, that gathers lessons, reference pages, projects, news and papers on that subject |
| Vendors | One page per silicon vendor, plus the open-source toolchain, with families, tools, licensing and migration notes |
| Reference | Cheat sheets, tables, a glossary and a board list, each with a “last verified” date |
| News | Short briefs on announcements, releases and industry events, each linked to its sources and to a page that teaches the background |
| Research digest | A weekly summary of papers on FPGAs and reconfigurable computing, in plain language |
| Projects | Build-this-at-home designs with full code, constraints and tool steps |
| Events | Conferences, courses and community meetings, with dates and costs |
The 70/30 rule
At least 70 % of the words on this site, measured over a rolling 30-day window, are evergreen teaching or reference material. News is capped at the remaining 30 %. If a week is busy with announcements, we publish fewer briefs or merge them into a roundup rather than let news crowd out the teaching. Every news brief links to at least one evergreen page so that the news feeds the learning rather than replacing it.
Independence
FPGA Guide takes no vendor sponsorship. At the time of writing there are no affiliate links and no advertising. When that changes, this page will say so before it happens, and sponsored content, if ever accepted, will be labelled on the page it appears on.
We name products as their makers write them and we say when a claim is a vendor’s rather than something we measured. Vendor names and product names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify those products. We have no relationship with AMD, Altera, Microchip, Lattice, Efinix, Gowin or any other company mentioned, beyond being their users.
Where we criticise a tool or a part, it is because we found a sharp edge, and we try to say exactly where it is.
How it is made
The site is written and maintained by a small editorial team, referred to on these pages as “we” or “the editor”. Content is drafted with AI assistance running on our own hardware, from sources that are read and summarised in new words, and every piece passes automated originality, fact-grounding and compile checks before a person reviews it. The full description, including what AI assistance means here and where its limits are, is on the editorial and AI policy page.
Reference pages carry a “last verified” date. If you find something wrong, the corrections page explains how to tell us and what happens next. You can reach the editor through the contact page.