> The actual design was implemented in a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. This is basically the biggest FPGA you can buy that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars for a devkit.
Note that this bit is rather outdated. :) The FPGA on an entry-level development board (like a Xilinx Artix-7 35T) is comparable in size -- as well as much faster! -- and you can go even bigger without stretching your budget too much.
If you're willing to get a little adventurous, in fact, you can get an FPGA that's over ten times the size for under $200:
I really need to make an updated blog post about it, but this project evolved into a reasonably-well-debugged Cray J90 core that fits quite comfortably in a Xilinx Artix-7 35T board (I made a somewhat bulky Cray J90 Smartwatch that tells time by running a real-time n-body simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons . . . inferring the current time is left as an exercise for the viewer).
For some products, such as their Zynq 7000 dev boards, you can also get a cheap time-limited copy of Xilinx SDSoC which allows easier device driver development to the programmable logic side:
Note that this bit is rather outdated. :) The FPGA on an entry-level development board (like a Xilinx Artix-7 35T) is comparable in size -- as well as much faster! -- and you can go even bigger without stretching your budget too much.
If you're willing to get a little adventurous, in fact, you can get an FPGA that's over ten times the size for under $200:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32907109444.html