Lots of jobs involed in:
1, Check bom.
2, Fabricate PCB.
3, Order components from digikey.
4, Build a sample board with a solder. The most difficult thing is to mount FPGA BGA chips to PCB.
Could anyone help me understand it...
1) Check the Bill of materials (BOM) and source (order) everything.
2) Find someone who manufactures printed circuit boards (PCBs) and send them the opensource gerber/drill files so that they can manufacture the bare PCB for you
3) See #2
4) Don't solder board. I know it can be done by hand, but you don't strike me as the person that has the tools and experience to solder SMT devices and through-hole is just asking for trouble. Not to mention re-flowing in a household oven is always hit or miss.
5) Attach JTAG cable and program FPGA and flash the firmware to the MCU
6) Mine Mine Mine.
You mentioned optimizing the design. Do you have a valid ISE license and know VHDL/Verilog as well as hardware architecture theory?
Awesome, thank you.
I didn't want to optimize it myself, I was just wondering if it had been done.