Guided by the book "The elements of computing systems" (by Noam Nisan e Shimon Schocken), I'm in practice building a mini and simple 16-bit computer. Implementing everything from the smallest chips (NAND, AND...), Registers, RAM, ALU, to the CPU on the hardware level. But also an Assembler, a Virtual Machine, a high-level programming language, a Compiler, and finally a Operating System
You can find READMEs within each subdirectory under software/ and hardware/ containing
my study notes for each software/hardware component. Example: Virtual Machine README
- CPU with 16-bit machine instructions
- ALU (with 18 native operations, arithmetic and logic operations being more specific)
- Data Register
- Address Rgister
- PC Register (Program-Counter which keeps the address of the next instruction)
- Control Unit (which is kinda abstract on my implentation)
- 32K ROM
- 16K RAM + 8K for memory-mapped I/O memory (screen + 1 for keyboard)
Built and tested using HDL and a hardware simulator and also a CPU emulator.
Note: 32K on memory measurement is the number of 16-bit registers (and K == 2^10 == 1024).
Note: Screen and Keyboard* were not built by me obviously. They are virtualized by one of the book's simulator.
- Assembler
- Translates Assembly symbolic code to machine language (machine instructions)
- VM translator/implementation (compiler backend)
- Translates VM intermediary code to assembly
- Hack high-level programming language
- Compiler
- OS
Thanks Noam and Shimon for this incredible book.
- Separate Assembler, VM, Compiler and OS in different repositories (maybe)
- Blog post explaining how a computer works from nand to tetris hihi =) (one of the reasons for this is to consolidate what I learned through these months)
- More detailed acknowledgment session