dipl/sections/intro.tex

In early 2018, more than a year before the official start of the project, after
searching for a subject for the diploma thesis, the idea of building a computer
from scratch has come up. Multiple suggestions on how to implement it and the
scope of the project were gathered. Originally the goal of the project was to
have a computer which would consist of seperate plug-in cards on each of which
one instruction would reside. This would debunk the mystery behind the ``black
box`` which processors are today.

Most processors today are only documented on the execution of their programs and
not on their internals. The projects aim was later redirected, due to concerns
about the difficulty of the project, to build a processor in VHDL instead. After
several months of implementation time the project was split into two parts: the
peripherals and the core processor. During the development processes and after
rememberingthe original goal to make a processor understandable, the
peripherals changed from being implemented in VHDL back to hardware, which came
with increased work but would result in a far more understandable final product.

The decision for a RISC-V based processor was made at the beginning of the 
project, because the core architecture is well documented, modular and almost
any part not implemented inside the processor(if not specifically
required by the software) should be emulateable in software.