A capstone computer engineering design course

This paper describes the senior computer engineering capstone design course at Washington University in St. Louis. As part of this course, three-student teams develop a complete 8-bit microprocessor using a hardware description language (VHDL) and implement their designs in a small FPGA. Programmed FPGA’s are “booted” at the end of the course and tested for accuracy. Students also write an assembler or a simple calculator for their microprocessor. This paper describes the microprocessor architecture and tool flow used in the course.