rapcores VS open-fpga-verilog-tutorial

Our project is: https://github.com/RAPcores/rapcores I have a draft article about the tools we use, but it is several months old now. We are about one year into the project, and I am amazed how every month some new tooling seems to pop up that solves some problem.

Really good write up. We recently did a tape out as well and had similar learnings :) Would have definitely been nice to see this a few months ago. As part of our CI we have started parsing with Yosys, Verilator, and IVerilog. I cannot recommend this enough. There is a perfectly capable subset of verilog dialect amongst all three, and gives you nice protability amongst FOSS toolchains. Running parsing checks is a great way to lint/sanity check things. We also put together a simple script to check register initializations that has been really helpful also: https://github.com/RAPcores/rapcores/blob/main/etc/reginit.sh

The toolchain is called Icestorm, main tool is yosys, most information will be in English. I started with this tutorials here (also in English) https://github.com/Obijuan/open-fpga-verilog-tutorial. Then I used books to learn more on the basics of cpu design in verilog (which can also found online). Obijuan is a Spanish profesor teaching digital electronics in university, he lead the development of a graphical user interface to generate verilog based on a blocks UI, which helps design circuits when you are starting, but unfortunately I believe all his videos are in Spanish, I'd suggest you give it a try even if you don't understand English, as the material available (wiki and videos) is very good. Look for "fpgawars jedi academy " and IceStudio (the tool). But in the end, I personally felt limited by the GUI tool (which was still under heavy development at the time) and went straight to code the verilog code by hand (which obviously is more flexible). Anyway I feel there are not that many pattern to know.

Among your choices, FPGA is the answer. I would suggest a cheap iCE40 board like the iCESugar, to get started. Then follow tutorials targetting ice40+open stack.