Oak Development Technologies Wants to Add a Little FPGA to Your Next Feather Project

Oak Development Technologies is back with another Lattice iCE40-powered field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development board, but unlike its previous efforts this one's not supposed to be used on its own: the Lattice FeatherWing is, instead, designed to expand Feather-format projects.

"FPGA allow you to bring a whole new level of complexity to your design, providing the flexibility to introduce custom logic developed in Verilog [hardware description language] and built with fully open source tools," Oak Development Technologies' Seth Kerr claims of his latest creation. "An icy [addition] to your FeatherWing collection brings a Lattice iCE5LP4K FPGA to your Feather'd shenanigans."

This isn't the first FPGA-powered Feather-format board Oak Development Technologies has released. Back in February last year the company opened pre-orders for the IcyBlue Feather, built around the Lattice iCE5LP4K — a design that was revamped this April to address some hardware errata and switch to the more modern USB Type-C connector for data and power.

The Lattice FeatherWing is, as the name suggests, an add-on for Feather-format development boards, built around the same FPGA as Oak's earlier IcyBlue Feather series — offering full compatibility with existing project examples, Kerr promises, while delivering additional user-accessible general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity.

The FPGA is exposed to the host Feather over the SPI bus, while the board's design breaks out the FPGA's GPIO pins to non-breadboard-friendly 0.1" header blocks — all except the RGB open-drain pins, which are connected to an on-board user-addressable RGB LED.

Oak Development Technologies is selling the Lattice FeatherWing on its Tindie store at $24.95; at the time of writing, no schematics or design files for the new board had been published on the company's GitHub repository.