8 Bit Processor

There were several road blocks that prevented me from running anything more than a glorified adder on my processor. The first and largest was my lack of understanding how Instruction memory and fetch logic worked. I understood the basics however when it came time to implement it, I was unsure of how to start. The part I misunderstood specifically was that each instruction used multiple clock cycles (Something I would learn in the MIPS processor project) this multiple cycle instruction memory fetching was the most conceptually challenging aspect but there was also a skill/experience barrier I ran into. EEPROM or Electronically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory is a very convenient way of storing combinational logic used for each instruction. It takes in an address and spits out pre-programmed non-volatile data, in this case all the different instructions that the processor could use. The skill issue arose while trying to initially program the EEPROM. My C skills were not very good at the time so using an Arduino to program every address was a very daunting task. In the end, these two roadblocks stopped me from achieving the full processor, however I was able to get the ALU working for Adding, Subtracting, Shifting, Logical And, and Logical Or. It was cool seeing it all work together and I learned a lot of useful concepts throughout the project.