The ULX3S is a fully open source, compact, robust and affordable FPGA board equipped with a balanced spectrum of extra components and expansions. Although primarily developed as a teaching tool for mastering the principles of digital circuit design 1, a wide selection of useful features and interfaces enables it to serve as a broad spectrum module for installation in complex devices.

ULX3S uses powerful Lattice Semiconductor ECP5 series FPGA chip supported by the latest open-source toolchains. This makes the ULX3S one of the most powerful and desirable platforms for FPGA enthusiasts available today. ULX3S comes equipped with onboard WiFi, display, buttons, LEDs and storage. Flash it using the WiFi connection (over-the-air update), or with one of the bitstreams stored on SD card and browsed by onboard OLED display and buttons. Due to its battery-backed RTC, it can power down completely and wake up only on certain events making it useful for low power applications such as battery-powered remote sensor nodes. And if you’re not of the low-power type, onboard peripherals such as SDRAM, USB, Digital video out, onboard FM/ASK antenna, ADC and DAC can make it audio/video powerhouse for signal processing and synthesis, motor control or SDR cases. You can emulate arcade machines or retro computers like Minimig(Amiga) or modern systems like F32C (MIPS/RISCV). It has 56 GPIO pins, all routed as differential pairs and a PMOD compatible pinout, opening it to a wide range of expansion options. If you are just starting with FPGA, you can also use the ULX3S as powerful Arduino and program it using Arduino IDE in seconds.

It has been actively developed since 2016 and is the result of collaboration between Radiona.org / Zagreb Makerspace and FER – Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing – University of Zagreb, Croatia.

1 ULX3S is being actively used in Digital Logic class at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia

Author of the board is EMARD - https://github.com/emard