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Old is the new new, right? When Ben Eater started to work on his 8-bit breadboard computer in 2015, it was an old and outdated design, but still new to most of us. As much as Ben’s productions are outstanding, there have been plenty of people before, who designed and developed 8-bit architectures and CPUs. And this time we have found one, that has gone unnoticed so far.

Ivan Sergeev is a FPGA engineer with seemingly lot’s of spare time. 🕖 If you have a look at his personal projects page, you will find a number of interesting things, not only related to hard- and software development.

One of Ivan’s project stuck with us. A simple 8-bit CPU in ~440 lines of Verilog. Check that one out!

If you played with Ben Eaters 8-bit or 6502 projects, Verilog or VHDL on an FPGA are the next logical step. And Ivan’s project is a perfect introduction, because it is simple, yet complete. It comes with the CPU implementation itself, a test bench, an assembler in Python as well as an example program.

The very well organized source will give you a perfect introduction to FPGA programming. Have a look, you will like it!