During Fall quarter of my Sophomore year at Rose I took Computer Architecture. For most of the quarter, the class is assigned to design a 16-bit processor in teams of 4. These are the results of that project for my group.
Design
In most of our lectures we discussed the MIPS architecture. When my team began working on this project we recognized that most other teams would simply copy the MIPS architecture and modify it to make it 16-bits. This is not an easy task in itself, but we wanted to be different, we wanted to do something no one else had done or was going to do. So we decided we would make our processor a stack based processor.
These are a few of the design documents we had to make throughout the quarter:
- Final Design Document - A compilation of most of the documentation we created throughout the quarter.
- Original Datapath - This is our original (Hand drawn) design for the datapath. Its a little messy, but hopefully understandable.
- Final Datapath - This is our final datapath drawing. Not much different from the original but much easier to read.
FPGA Implementation
We actually managed to get the processor design onto our FPGA, and ran a few simple programs to test it. However the entire assignment was to implement a processor and run a specific program (C code for this program was given) and we were unable to write this program in our machine code in time. So, technically, we didnt finish the project, but we did manage to get the processor itself on the FPGA, which a lot of groups had trouble with.