[mlmitch]

The other comment about a kit is a good suggestion. FPGA cloud instances are also an option.

Register Transfer Level (RTL) development generally has less pleasant tooling and a much longer feedback cycle than software development. So expect some friction there.

Also, for the algorithms part, you might have something in software that isn’t a great match to hardware and will need some re-architecting. Sorting is a good example of this. Check out “sorting networks” for a popular way of accomplishing sorting in hardware.

I did a master’s thesis on transitioning a graph inference algorithm into an FPGA implementation. Send me an email if you have any specific questions.