Tang Nano Series and Gowin FPGAs for Beginners: A Practical Guide, Part 1

RE: Tang Nano Series and Gowin FPGAs for Beginners: A Practical Guide, Part 1

dang74 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:32:40 GMT

Thanks [mention:b0bc65b9ecdc4307bd967592f00e340a:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] I have the both 1k and 9k boards. Sadly, I have not used them yet... but you wrote a nice overview and perhaps that will serve as an inspiration.

RE: Tang Nano Series and Gowin FPGAs for Beginners: A Practical Guide, Part 1

michaelkellett — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:30:18 GMT

Thanks for this - I look forward to seeing what you make it do !

The Tang boards are pretty good value and the Gowin FPGAs are getting quite good. I have some Tang bits to play with but all my time is being used up on an Artix 7 project at the moment.

Gowin say that they have a simulator:

RE: Tang Nano Series and Gowin FPGAs for Beginners: A Practical Guide, Part 1

jc2048 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:10:50 GMT

Thanks. A useful introduction to the Tang boards and their Gowin FPGAs.

They all look useful for different kinds of things. The 1k for learning the fundamentals of basic logic design, the 9k would lend itself nicely to experimenting with simple soft processors, and the 20k for more ambious stuff - you could do a whole music synthesizer with that one.

Presumably, the separate clock synthesizer chip is there for the specialised clocks you need for audio and video work.

RE: Tang Nano Series and Gowin FPGAs for Beginners: A Practical Guide, Part 1

kk99 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:33:22 GMT

I haven’t used an FPGA with Gowin yet. I found a nice, minimalist and inexpensive board with an Artix-7:

RE: Tang Nano Series and Gowin FPGAs for Beginners: A Practical Guide, Part 1

embeddedguy — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 06:11:30 GMT

Nice information. I think Pi Pico PIO peripheral would have some limitations compared to FPGA. Otherwise, I would love to work on PIO using C/C++ to avoid learning VHDL or similar. [emoticon:c4563cd7d5574777a71c318021cbbcc8]