24 lines
1.4 KiB
TeX
24 lines
1.4 KiB
TeX
In early 2018, more than a year before the official start of the project, after
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searching for a subject for the diploma thesis, the idea of building a computer
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from scratch had come up. Multiple suggestions on how to implement it and the
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scope of the project were gathered. Originally, the goal was to
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design a computer consisting of seperate plug-in cards, one instruction would
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residing on each. This would open up the ``black box`` of modern processor
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design, showing the basic components at a macroscopic scale.
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For most of today's processors, documentation only exists for the execution of
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programs (the runtime), not for their internals. The project's aim was later
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redirected due to concerns about difficulty, and an FPGA-based design was opted
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for instead. After
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several months of implementation time, the project was split into two parts: the
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peripherals and the core processor. During the development process, and to get
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back to the original goal of making a processor understandable, the
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peripherals changed from being implemented in VHDL back to hardware.
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This increased the required effort, but would result in a far more
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understandable final product.
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The decision to use a RISC-V based processor was made at the beginning of the
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project because the core architecture is well documented and modular, and because
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almost any feature not implemented inside the processor can be emulated using
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software instead.
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