[bayesian_horse]

I'm divided on this. It's hard for me to figure out what this hardware is actually good for, and particularly in which use cases it beats FPGAs. As far as I can see, FPGAs or DSP-cores in MCUs/processors seem to be the real competitor, and the question will be at what sampling rate a DSP solution will outperform whatever this ZRNA does.

And on top of that, the API looks quite understandable, so it may be easier to use the ZRNA for a certain signal processing task than create a custom DSP Core in Verilog or dig through MCU documentation. Though you could probably make an API for generating verilog code for the Icestorm toolchain, which would not require deep knowledge of digital design.

Other questions are bandwidth and sampling constraints. It seems to have at least one ADC...

[tarcyanm]

It's undoubtedly aimed at musical audio generation and signal processing. A quick search will reveal the number of gotchas in implementing even a simple alias-free (bandlimited interpolation) digital sawtooth wave, never mind arbitrary wave tables. The rebirth of analog audio synths was partially driven by the complex behaviors of real analog circuitry - particularly when you account for saturation, hysteresis and other "imperfections" that don't occur naturally in a digital simulation.

[cmrdporcupine]

It would potentially be good for audio applications. Analog oscillator and filter emulation is actually quite processor intensive and is never perfect, always has aliasing.