FPGAs

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The IDE is called Quartus II and is free. See www.altera.com (http://www.altera.com)

The FPGAs are kind of expensive 5 to 30 dollars for the application that you talked about.

They are programmed in Verilog or VHDL. Use google to find out more.

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The free version only supports the low end devices, which will probably suit this application. You can get starter development boards for a few hundred dollars. Low end altera parts may be individually $5-50, but then you have to cost in all the extra parts and cost of developing your own board.