After a busy week spent traveling for work and a morning digging out from a surprise snowstorm, I had a great weekend with my family. It was Sunday night before I heated up the soldering iron and got down to business building the ProASIC 3 nano FPGA board.
I started with the toughest component, the FPGA. Its central location and low height means that I will have an easier time accessing it before other components are mounted. That is not likely to be a big problem for this board, with plenty of space around the chip, but I would still prefer not to have to work around the filter capacitors if I can avoid it. On the other hand, its 100 pins and 0.5 mm pin pitch makes it far and away the most difficult soldering job on the PCB.