I can make a guess. I have an impression, that everybody here likes open source and FPGAs very much. Author of this post is implementing “Private Island: Open Source FPGA-Based Network Processor for Privacy, Security, IoT, and Control” as described in https://mindchasers.com/dev/private-island

This might be a hot topic, but I can’t say exactly since this isn’t my domain. I know 2 startups working on this. One uses MAX10 FPGA, the other one is internal big Corp startup trying with their own RISC-V ASIC and secure operating system. They both do not have good product/market fit.

Regarding this exact post it’s weird, that I2C is used for debugging. One needs to actively poll the registers. I am using UART for this in my designs. It’s easier, because I do not need additional hardware to receive my debug data. It comes to my terminal in windows with no effort.