My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II

My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II (part 4)

22-mar-2026

Time to design a new board

I didn’t want to simply recreate what I had before. Making something more advanced meant soldering BGA. I wasn’t sure if I could do it, but I decided to try anyway.

Specifically, I wanted a more advanced FPGA – I chose the Efinix Ti60F256 – and more modern memory – IM8G16D3FFBG, which is a 1GB DDR3L chip. The first has 256 pins and the second has 96, both with a 0.8 mm pitch.

Some IC in BGA-256 package. Not Ti60 though, but looks very similar.

After the struggles with DDR1, I had absolutely no desire to reinvent the memory controller. Fortunately, I found something with the promising name “DDR3 Soft Controller Core” on the Efinix website. On their community forum, I was also pointed to a guide on DDR3 PCB layout recommendations.

There were new unfamiliar terms, so I had to spend more time diving into the theory.

I barely managed to meet the trace length matching requirements. The recommendations also suggested routing all address and command lines on a single layer, but that seemed impossible. Instead, I tried to account for the difference in signal propagation speeds across different layers and compensated by shortening the traces on the internal layer.

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