Learn in this Q&A with Adam Taylor, Founder of Adiuvo Engineering, how he used the Efinix Trion® T8 FPGA to develop the compact and versatile Forgix board.
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August 27, 2026
Learn in this Q&A with Adam Taylor, Founder of Adiuvo Engineering, how he used the Efinix Trion® T8 FPGA to develop the compact and versatile Forgix board.
A Forgix board pairs a Raspberry Pi RP2354 microcontroller with an Efinix Trion T8 FPGA on a single Teensy-sized, breadboard-friendly board, and it costs just $50.
The RP2354 provides dual Arm Cortex-M33 cores (with optional RISC-V), USB, SPI, I2C, UART, and ADC, while the Trion T8F49 offers 7,384 logic elements of programmable fabric for custom logic, signal processing, and hardware acceleration. The board also includes QSPI PSRAM, an RGB LED, a user push button, and a single USB-C connector for power and programming of both devices.
Everything on the board is also open source, with the schematics, KiCad project, and example designs all published for developers to explore and build on. It provides everything a developer needs to explore the intersection of microcontrollers and FPGAs; in a board you can hold between two fingers.
We wanted a compact FPGA which offered high performance and low power in a small package, at a price point that let us hit the $50 target for the complete board. The Trion T8 gives us 7,384 logic elements, which is enough to do genuinely useful work like custom peripherals, accelerators, and DSP pipelines, while its Quantum® Architecture keeps power consumption low. The Efinity toolchain is also free and straightforward to get started with, which mattered to us, as a key goal of Forgix is making FPGA development accessible.
Forgix gives developers the best of both worlds. It enables them to access high performance, deterministic, and responsive FPGA fabric while at the same time being able to use the RP2354 for interfacing, configuration, and sequential control.
The MCU handles what processors do best, such as USB communication, protocol stacks, and control flow, while the FPGA handles what fabric does best, namely parallelism, precise timing, and custom hardware. The RP2354 can even configure the FPGA directly, so the whole board can be managed over a single USB-C connection.
You can get a significant performance increase by using the T8 as a hardware accelerator, offloading parallel or timing-critical processing from the MCU. It can also be used to create interfaces which cannot be supported natively by the RP2354, such as custom protocols, high-speed capture, or bespoke peripherals. Beyond that, it is an ideal learning platform.
For anyone who knows microcontrollers and wants to take their first steps into FPGA design, Forgix provides a low-cost, low-risk way to do so, and because all the source is open, developers can learn from the reference designs as well as create their own.
Such a compact form factor enables it to be easily integrated into many applications as it requires minimal footprint, and it can even be soldered down directly if desired. The Teensy-compatible footprint means it drops straight into a breadboard for prototyping, then transfers into the final product. The single USB-C for power and for programming both the RP2354 and FPGA also makes interfacing with the board very simple. No adapters, no external programmers, just plug in and start developing.
The three big drivers were cost, size, and accessibility. We wanted to hit a $50 price point, so experimentation is effortless, while still delivering a genuinely capable dual-chip system. Fitting the MCU, FPGA, power, and configuration circuitry into a 28-pin Teensy footprint took careful power architecture and escape routing.
We also wanted the out-of-box experience to be as simple as possible, hence a single USB-C for power and programming both devices, on-board SWD debug via Tag-Connect, and the RGB LED and push button so users can interact with the board immediately.
Finally, openness was a design decision from day one. All the source is available to developers, including the schematics, the KiCad project files, and the example designs, so there are no black boxes and nothing to reverse engineer.
The response has been amazing. In the first month we sold hundreds of boards across the globe, and we have seen several great projects created everywhere from Alaska to New Zealand and all points in between. The board has also been picked up widely in the press, with coverage from Hackster, Electronic Engineering Journal, and CNX Software.
Seeing the community build tool flows and tutorials around the board so quickly, helped by everything being open source, has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the launch.
Interested in exploring what the Trion T8 can do? Learn more about the Forgix board or get started with Efinix FPGA development kits.