Fomu An FPGA board that fits inside your USB port

4 days ago (crowdsupply.com)

What do people do with these? I'm struggling to think of any use-case where someone would need a tiny FPGA in a USB port.

  • If it used the edge of the PCB to build a USB-C port you could have added a USB-C plug to your PCB and inserted this module like a compute module and used the majority of the pins for GPIO.

    But in this form it is kinda useless except as a hobby.

But is it fast enough to do USB 3?

If so, here's a nice and simple project idea: that board with two USB connectors and connect it to the two ends of the same cable; you send a pseudorandom bitstream down one end and verify if it comes out correctly at the other end and report the bit error rate (USB cable tester)

  • looks like it only has the physical connections for USB 2. Fun fact about usb 3, it’s really a completely separate physical standard from usb 2, just designed in such a way that a single port can have BOTH usb 2.0 and 3.0 connectors in it at the same time. In theory this would allow for devices to use the full bandwidth of 3.0 + the full bandwidth of 2.0, but as far as I know no device does that.

    • > In theory this would allow for devices to use the full bandwidth of 3.0 + the full bandwidth of 2.0, but as far as I know no device does that.

      Not as a single device (no XHCI controllers allow this), but yes if you presented two devices to the OS (with some XHCI controllers.)