by OLIMEX Ltd in fpga, open source, OSHW, project Tags: cpu, fpga, icestorm, Open, oshw, Source

Michael Schröder sent us link to his project nand2tetris-13 yesterday.

He managed to build his own CPU, to write Assembler, Jack high level language, OS and then write Fibonacci demo and Pong game. All this done on Open Source Hardware FPGA board iCE40HX8K-EVB with MOD-LCD2.8RTP as display and FOSS tools IceStorm project. Keyboard is done by UART but my guess is that it could be easily implemented by iCE40-IO .

This is perfect project to teach students about so many things: Combinatory Logic, Sequential Logic, Computer Achitecture, Machine code to Assembler, High level language Compilers, simple OS and so on.

And the best here is that you can see this working on hardware not just boring lectures. Student can experiment with their own CPU and write applications like small games etc.