The digital circuits required for a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, including a pulse programmer, a direct digital synthesizer, a digital receiver, and a PC interface, have been built inside a single chip of the field-programmable gate-array (FPGA). By combining the FPGA chip with peripheral analog components, a compact, laptop-sized homebuilt spectrometer has been developed, which is capable of a rf output of up to 400 MHz with amplitude-, phase-, frequency-, and pulse-modulation. The number of rf channels is extendable up to three without further increase in size.