Maybe it's as simple as taking a single FPGA and connecting it to the desired peripherals? No controllers, no interfaces, nothing. Connect the GPIO of the chip directly to the keyboard matrix, directly to the display bus, directly to the SD card, the headphone jack, etc.
Take for example the upcoming TinyFPGA EX. It has over 50 usable GPIO's. That's plenty to drive a keyboard, any number of displays, SPI, i2c, etc. devices. It makes me wonder how far you could take it, maybe even the power management bus?
The point is maybe you can just build a whole damn computer out of a single piece of dynamic logic. It might not be the fastest or easiest way, and some would say it's not the smartest way, but a lot of people said the same thing about building a general-purpose computer out of a calculator chip and that turned out to be worth a shot anyway.
A computer built this way could become any kind of computer. It could be a recreation of a historical machine or something completely new, and it can all be done by writing code.
It's true that such a machine built around the TinyFPGA EX and it's Lattice ECP5 chip isn't going to rival a machine with the latest Intel or AMD CPU at running things like Windows or Linux, but as for myself (and I think a growing number of others) the time has come to explore alternatives to those over complicated systems with their endless hunger for hardware, continuous stream of security breaches and deliberate incursions into personal privacy.
A computer that can be synthesized from scratch, where it's possible to know exactly what it's doing, made out of simple parts that anyone with the desire can learn to understand would be a radical departure from what we have available today.
If I can carve-out a little time this summer I'm going to try to piece something like this together out of the parts I have on-hand. With any luck I'll know what I'm doing by the time the EX ships in the fall and I can produce a standard machine around that board. If there's any interest shown by others along the way, maybe I'll get a kit ready in time for Xmas...
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026