How does one get involved in FPGA development?

Take a look at https://old.reddit.com/r/FPGA/

Whatever people may say about reddit, it seems to be a good starting point to get started with pretty much any hobby (even if it's just to get a link to another community).

Edit: https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga looks interesting.

Own an FPGA(?)

I started down this path a few months ago. Here's a few links I've collected that have been useful

- https://nandgame.com/

- https://www.asic-world.com/verilog/verilog_one_day.html

- https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Problem_sets

- https://edaplayground.com/home

Since using an FPGA requires designing hardware at the logic gate level, the realistic answer is to get a computer engineering degree or the equivalent self-study. The HDLs (Hardware Description Language) used to specify these circuits may superficially resemble a programming language but they really, really aren't.

You can get a rough idea of what you're getting into by going through the NAND2Tetris self-learning course ( https://www.nand2tetris.org/ ) and the associated textbook The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles. But that's just scratching the bare surface of the depth you'd need to go to to get useful acceleration.

That doesn't even go into the eyewatering cost of the development tools and professional FPGA boards. There are free versions of the tools and small FPGA boards intended for student and hobbyist use but, assuming your code is non-trivial, they're unlikely to get you any significant speed up.

> I met a trader who suggested I get my code running on FPGA hardware. He didn't know how exactly to get started.

Did he say why? It's hard to see what the motive for this is.

I bought a cheap Sipeed Tang Nano 9K FPGA Development Board (Gowin GW1NR-9 RISC-V HDMI) for $24 last year via Amazon. I ended up using Yosys[1] as a toolchain for programing, instead of the one from the manufacturer, code/program it. I had a lot of fun.

[1] https://yosyshq.net/yosys/