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Part 4 of a DIY FPGA board series documents the design and assembly of a next-generation board featuring the Efinix Ti60F256 FPGA and 1GB DDR3L memory in BGA packages. The author details the challenges of 6-layer PCB design, trace length matching for DDR3, and hand-soldering BGA chips using a bottom heater and solder paste stencil. The custom SoC built on the FPGA uses VexiiRiscv (a RISC-V core in SpinalHDL), along with custom Verilog/SpinalHDL modules for video, DMA, SPI, I2C, and audio controllers. Performance results show a single RISC-V core at 207 MHz achieving ~511 DMIPS, 1GB RAM, 45 MB/s SD card reads, and DMA memset at 1130 MB/s — enough to run Doom and Heroes of Might and Magic II, with Quake II optimization coming in later parts.

My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II (part 4)