Are you from Pakistan? I have an Alchitry Cu FPGA board for my personal use if you want to borrow it for implementation. Awesome project btw!
Sure! will mail you.
Show HN: We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students
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Re: Show HN: We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students
#52Computer architecture (I think my uni named it comp org) was one of my toughest courses in undergrad! It steered me away from hardware. I now wonder if that is still the case today? ARM has exploded onto he scene and I'm fascinated by the sheer amount of development going on in the chip space.
Many principles in computer architecture were discovered loooong ago. Pipelining, multi-core cpu's, virtual memory, various types of caching, etc etc. It's just that today's tech squeezes orders of magnitude more logic into a mm^2. So the scale of what's considered a small or big project has changed.
Obviously that requires a more rigorous approach. So I'd expect courses in this field to put more emphasis on testing & validation methods (and tools to do that).
> ARM has exploded onto he scene
ARM is mature tech now. I'd say most excitement is around RISC-V these days. Well that and GPUs, AI accelerators, FPGAs, manycore cpus, photonics, quantum computing, ...
Re: Show HN: We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did the same (4-bit cpu, 11 instructions) in my Microprocessors class, out of 74-series logic, one GAL20V8 to handle the SLE instruction and an EPROM (not an EEPROM - one with the clear window you exposed to UV light to erase. That was also where I learned about ground-bounce & dynamic IR-drop effects due to those long looping wires between breadboards. That was a fun class.
Raise your hand if you still have a UV eraser at the bottom of a cabinet somewhere.
I always used the one in the school lab. Since that’s also the only place where I could program the eeprom :)