Building a mini computer (hardware and software)

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

Specs

Hardware

• 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.

Software

• 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

Acknowledgment

Thanks Noam and Shimon for this incredible book.

TODOs:

• 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