This book is written for electronic hobbyists. I am going to challenge you to do a "Mission Impossible". The goal in this book is to help you with this "Mission Impossible" - you can follow my journey to design, build, and program a CPU. In the end, I hope you have learned enough to design and build a CPU of your own! To physically build our CPU, we are going to employ a FPGA (field programmable gate array). FPGAs are integrated circuits which can be configured into digital logic using a hardware description programming language. We will take some time to explore digital logic and then CPUs in general. We will then define what we want our own CPU to look like, and start designing it. Because we can't do anything with just a CPU, our design will, out of necessity, need to be more than just the CPU. We will need to create a complete, although simple, computer in order to communicate with our CPU and program it. So, for example, we will need to add RAM memory, ROM memory, and serial communication to our CPU. In essence, we are going to design and build a microcontroller, not just its CPU! We are going to develop all this is a series of projects, starting with some simple logic circuits, and gradually working up to building our CPU. You will design and build a CPU and its associated peripherals. You will learn assembly language and how to program your CPU.
