Tangible results

Yesterday, I resolved some major issues with some help and direction from Steve.  I took a stab in the dark and flashed my board, and lo and behold, the hex and leds began flashing at random. Considering how sparse my state machine is, that's exactly what I was expecting. A good four hours of solid hdl work and some preliminary coding and let the testing begin!

Frustrations

I am running into many snags now, with the alu and control module. It's slowing me down but I'm certain I can get it up and running in no time. Also, the deadline for the progress report is fast approaching so it's time for my least favorite task.

Operation control

After consulting with Steve, I have some great momentum again.  Some of the more technical aspects of VHDL and digital logic are coming back to me and the structure of my descriptions are becoming more precise.  I am almost ready to start describing the state machine that drives the ALU and register access.  I am implementing a modified and abridged version of the MIPS operation set. So far, I have selected 34 basic operations that I would like to implement, and will try to get the mathematical ones up and running by week's end.  The program operations - break, jump, etc. - will be next, and then we'll see about the memory access ones, like load word and such.  I have enough registers at the moment that I needn't worry about write memory functions for the time being.

More to come soon.

I/O Registers

After some trial and error, I have the I/O register hardware simulating nicely in ModelSim.  Still struggling with memory and the ALU's state machine at this point but things are coming along.  Once I meet with Steve the rest of the hardware should be easy enough.  Then it's on to platform testing.  Time to dust off the ol' DE1 again!

Software registers

<p>Preliminary tests on the sw regs are promising. 64 of them ought to be <br>
plenty. Still reasoning out how to use an sfr to control the gpios but lots of time for that.