Designing of a 16 - bit microprocessor by using FPGA

History has marked a large number of man endeavours towards building machines that are capable of performing arithmetic operations more efficiently than he can do himself. These started with very primitive instruments but evolved over the course of time due to the accumulative knowledge of man kind. In the recent decades, many computer architectures exhibiting various design methodologies and computation models have been developed. One of the most widely accepted of which is von-Neumann architecture. The brilliant mathematician, John Louis von-Neumann (1903-1957) proposed in - 1945 - a model for a general purpose computer that provides programmability and reprogrammability thanks to a memory structure that stores programs and data. This paper introduces a 16 bit microprocessor that adopts von-Neumann architecture and is implemented on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) . In addition to that, the paper presents a software development environment for designed microprocessor. Microprocessor also exhibits the characteristics of a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer). It has a small set of instructions and a limited number of addressing modes.