Ashok Tinkering Labs, based in Ahmedabad, India, is preparing to launch Soan Papdi, an FPGA development board aimed at beginners, on the crowdfunding platform Crowd Supply. According to the company, the board comes with onboard LEDs, switches, and GPIO headers, and is designed so users can begin digital design work without additional hardware setup. The listing states the project is currently in a "coming soon" phase, with sign-ups open for notification when the campaign launches.
The board is built around a Lattice iCE40UP5K FPGA with 5,280 logic lookup tables, 120 Kbit of embedded block RAM, and 1 Mbit of single-port SPRAM, according to the product specifications. It also includes 128 Mbit of onboard SPI flash storage, a USB Type-C port "fully controlled by FPGA" with no external microcontroller, and a preloaded DFU bootloader. The company states the board supports open-source toolchains including Yosys, nextpnr, IceStorm, Icarus Verilog, Amaranth HDL, and iCEStudio, and works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
According to the listing, the company said the design process took ten months of "designing, testing, and refining the board through multiple hardware iterations and real user feedback." The company also states that board schematics, a bill of materials, example projects, and documentation will be published to a public GitHub repository before units ship. The team is listed as Hardik Seth, Piyush Itankar, and Lakshya Seth.
