HW Testing shows that I can get about 2.5MH/s (for the sha256/skein algo) out of a Cyclone IV E115.  Not impressive.  That's only burning about 1W though, so that's 2.5MH/s/W which is kinda "cool" if you're gonna make a large rig of dozens of FPGAs.  With my rig, once I get the stratum proxy working, I'm expecting around 180MH/s for myr-skein.  That's about what you'd expect from a single modern GPU ... meh.

Disappointment.

This still will yield about 5x what my rig is yielding today running the scrypt algo though.  ASICs are starting to kick my ass in the Scrypt realm.  Todays cryptocurrency landscape doesn't appear to have much room left for FPGAs.  The algo's are a whole generation newer (and more complex) than they were in BitCoin days and those damned GPUs are REALLY REALLY fast now!  Even though GPUs are not running algo steps in parallel (like an FPGA can) they're running their core at some insane GHz speed that more than makes up for it.  If I really work at timing issues I can get logic steps in the FPGA to run up to 100MHz.  That's roughly the theoretical max for how fast a single fully unrolled instance of an algo machine can run in this FPGA.  The SHA3 generation of algos though are so much more complex than SHA2 that you'd never fit an entire fully unrolled instance in a single IC.  You have to start making trade offs to shrink the logic into something that will fit and this means increasing the number of clocks per hash.  I've run out of steam at 64 clocks per hash for Skein.

Quite a learning experience

Nice.  Thanks for the MiriadCoin tip.  I have the hash algorithm blocks for a kein or Miriad FPGA miner, but I'm missing the little details like what the initial header fed to the hasher looks like, how the different hash ins/outs connect together (Skein is 512 bits and SHA-256D is 256 bits), if there's anything unique about the difficulty/target calculation, etc.  Any advice on where to find these details?  I've picked apart source code for other coins before for these details and would rather avoid that frustration if the details are available in a more user friendly form.

I am an FPGA dude and stumbled upon SkeinCoin.  I just happen to have working Verilog code for Skein512 and SHA256D from other projects.  It seems like I could put together an FPGA miner in short order if I was inclined to do so.  Should I consider mining SkeinCoins?  I can't tell if folks here would like this or not.  It may swamp the network hashrate and frustrate CPU/GPU miners.  However, if I make it open source and it becomes widely adopted it will likely drive the price up so anyone who's been mining for a while will see their previously mined coins run up in value.  It could breath new life into SkeinCoin which may be welcome with it's latest woes.

So, SkeinCoin FPGA solution ... Good thing ... bad thing?