I think if Nova wants to get started in FPGA development, a more realistic idea would be for him to experiment with making an FPGA implementation of a Bitcoin miner instead.  He's already caught up on the details of SHA256 rounds afterall..  

Nova, consider experimenting with Bitcoin instead.  It'll be a lot easier, since SHA256D is almost the only thing you'll need to figure out (+/- some miscellaneous fiddly details and communications), and you can happily instance copies of your core all over the place until you run out of logic area.  Figuring out scrypt is much harder than that, but because it uses SHA256, you'll need to come to grips with that hashing algorithm first anyway.