The GOWIN GW1NR9-C FPGA at the heart of Brisbane Silicon's new ELM11-Feather gives developers something no standard microcontroller board can: the ability to reprogram the hardware itself. Built around roughly 8,000 LUTs running a PicoRV32 softcore at up to 70 MHz with 1 MB of RAM and 8 MB of flash, the board treats its processor, peripherals, and I/O configuration as swappable "hardware overlays" rather than fixed silicon. The GOWIN family already has a mature open source synthesis path through Yosys, nextpnr, and Project Apicula, so developers who prefer a fully open toolchain have that option alongside GOWIN's proprietary IDE. The nextpnr-himbaechel backend serves as the current Gowin place-and-route path within that toolchain and covers the GW1NR-9 device family.
Brisbane Silicon frames the platform as "full-stack programmable" across three layers. Lua handles application logic with a native REPL on each CPU core, C provides the driver interface, and SystemVerilog or VHDL lets developers build custom peripherals directly in the FPGA fabric. A quadrature encoder, for example, can be implemented in RTL, wrapped in a C driver, and surfaced as callable Lua functions. The concept resembles the programmable I/O blocks on the Raspberry Pi Pico, but extends reconfigurability well beyond dedicated state machines to the entire processor architecture. Overlays can change the CPU frequency, core count, and which peripherals exist, all without modifying application code.
The accompanying Arvore IDE handles project creation, code editing, overlay installation, and deployment across all three layers from a single interface, with a beta already available. Pre-built binaries target Debian-based Linux distributions, with Ubuntu recommended, alongside Windows 11 builds, and the Python source is on GitHub for use on other platforms. Brisbane Silicon plans to release the firmware API and board schematics under the MIT license after the crowdfunding campaign concludes, and the embLua firmware source is already on GitHub.
Measuring 22.86 x 64.65 x 4.85 mm, the board follows the Adafruit Feather specification and supports existing FeatherWing expansion boards. Its 23 digital I/O pins can be configured at runtime for GPIO, PWM, UART, SPI, or I2C depending on the active overlay, and the six positions normally reserved for analog inputs provide additional digital I/O instead. Power circuitry includes a 3.3 V regulator rated at 500 mA peak and a built-in 500 mA LiPo charger. The ELM11-Feather is live on Crowd Supply at $39 (€36), with shipping scheduled to begin November 2026.
