I have torn a board with Altera Cyclone chip from a defective plasma television. That’s EP1C3T100C8 chip: one hundred legs, but only 65,2910 logic elements, 59904 bits of memory and one PLL are intended for users. While my board production technology is not perfect and I still not have concept of the final product, I use a universal factory mounted adapter. I mounted the power, program and configuration board to the adapter. I used simple wires for connection of both boards. As there was the single layer board, Kynar wires were necessary.
The right side:
I shaded unusable legs and their numbers with black colour, as they distracted my attention. The inside marks do not disturb, but I think I’ll shade them too.
Here is the worse side (made by ironing technology, thus the quality is not enough):
Here are mounted: two stabilizers VccIO-3.3V, VccINT-1.5V, several capacitors, oscillator 25 MHz, connected to 10th leg of the cyclone, several pull-up and pull-down resistors. A configuration chip is also soldered. I haven’t tested it yet, as my ByteBlaster, connected to printer port, is not able to reconfigure the chip. There is a way to force the cyclone to rewrite this chip itself, but I have not “grown up” to that yet. Two connector also are here: one for JTAG and the other for EPCS1 reconfiguration.
Here are Black and White PCB image and Cadsoft Eagle files. They differ from the bord in a photo as photo version has many mistakes. Theoretically, I corrected mistakes in the archive but probably made the new ones.
You can also find FPGA/CPLD chips in the oldest models of routers and servers, DSL modems, telecommunications equipment, “more exotic” PCI boards, i.e. in more expensive equipment of less circulation. Good hunting!