Good list, thanks. I have a couple of years professional experience as a software dev and worked in the embedded space too. Nowadays I am in security and that is definitely an area of interest.
I only dabble with recreationally reverse engineering industrial/consumer grade HW and following blogs/conferences, so I can only provide a rough shotgun of search terms to try and hit something you're interested in:
- The Glasgow interface explorer is an example of a smaller FPGA making interface level RE tooling more accessible.
- The Chipwhisperer hardware has a focus on power supply glitching, side-channel attacks and general hardware security education/testing.
- There's a handful of FPGA-based implementations intended for high-speed protocol sniffing/MiTM (TCP/IP, USB and CANBus are both pretty common) on github etc, Cynthion is one example.
- Some recent projects have been trying to implement and improve the FOSS ARM Cortex programming and trace experience, Orbuculum ORBTrace probe is an example though the benefits aren't fully realised yet.
- In an odd use-case for an FPGA, I've personally seen hardware that enforces brutal/paranoid DRM/licencing via customised downloaded bitstreams to guards against reverse-engineering/copy efforts, all to most likely run a soft-CPU. I've read (unsubstantiated) that this approach appears on some military hardware.
- Slightly adjacent to specific FPGA projects, but the SDR tooing ecosystem has lots of cool stuff to play with for wireless signal identification/spoofing/re-implementation. HackRF, LimeSDR, GNUradio etc. If you want to get deep then there's lots of overlap with custom FPGA implementations.
