Show HN: My summer project - simulated CPU built from NAND gates

This book is excellent - http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ . I have a whole working system based on the exercises in this book - https://github.com/jamii/tecs .

Another direction you might want to explore is to learn VHDL or Verilog and implement the CPU on an FPGA board.

You can get a prototype board for around $100 and should be able to build something to cover most of, say, the MIPS instruction set.

This would be a more engineering oriented project; I would follow along an 'introduction to computer organization' style course from a university (just google and you can determine the required textbook, exercises etc).

It's exciting to write some C code, compile it to mips instruction set with gcc (I had to do some fudging here because my cpu didn't implement the entire instruction set) -- and then run it on the fpga and get the right numbers.

Awesome! The intro computer architecture class at MIT (6.004) actually does this same thing over the course of the term. (http://6004.csail.mit.edu/). Of course it's not just NANDs, but the basic idea is working from the FET level in the first lab, then building up abstractions each subsequent lab until a Beta processor is built by the 6th. You might find some of the resources on that website helpful. Everything is built using a program one of the professors built where you define lists of components and subcircuits. Good luck!

This semester I had a course where we had to implement a MIPS based processor from the ground up, with pipeline, caches, forwarding, and other techniques. I recommend starting with a basic non-pipelined MIPS processor, as it is not hard to find information, and go from there.

We had to use VHDL, and also used some predefined ports, so we hadn't to create everything from nand gates like you are trying to do. The book we used was "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" by Hennessy & Patterson.