E80: an 8-bit CPU in structural VHDL
Details
- External ID
- 46662390
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- E80: an 8-bit CPU in structural VHDL
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Jan. 17, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 34
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.733201581027668
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I built a new 8-bit CPU in VHDL from scratch (starting from the ISA). I felt that most educational soft-cores hide too much behind abstraction, eg. if I can do a+b with a single assignment that calls an optimized arithmetic library, then why did I learn the ripple carry adder in the first place ? And why did I learn flip flops if I can do all my control logic with a simple PROCESS statement like I would with a programming language ? Of course abstraction is the main selling point of HDLs, but would it work if I tried to keep strictly structural and rely on ieee.std_logic_1164 only ?Well, it did and it works nicely. No arithmetic libraries, no PROCESS except for the DFF component (obviously). Of course it's a bit of a "resource hog" compared to optimized cores, (eg. the RAM is build out of flip flops instead of a block ram that takes advantage of FPGA intermal memory) but you can actually trace every signal through the datapath as it happens.I also build an assembler in C99 without external libraries (please be forgiving, my code is very primitive I think). I bundled Sci1 (Scintilla), GHDL and GTKWave into a single installer so you can write assembly and see the waveforms immediately without having to spend hours configuring simulators. Currently Windows only, but at some point I'll have to do it on Linux too. I tested it on the Tang Primer 25K and Cyclone IV, and I included my Gowin, Quartus and Vivado projects files. That should make easy to run on your FPGA.Everything is under the GPL3.(Edit: I did not use AI. Not was it a waste of time for the VHDL because my design is too novel -- but even for beta testing it would waste my time because those LLMs are too well trained for x86/ARM and my flag logic draws from 6502/6800 and even my ripple carry adder doesn't flip the carry bit in subtraction. Point is -- AI couldn't help. It only kept complaining that my assembler's C code wasn't up to 2026 standards)
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- 8-bit cpu implemented in vhdl
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Designing a custom 8-bit CPU ISA and implementing it in purely structural VHDL down to logic gates and custom adders requires formal digital hardware design and computer architecture expertise.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires creating a custom Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), followed by explicit structural hardware definition in VHDL—specifying individual logic gates, flip-flops, multiplexers, ALUs with gate-level carry logic, and control unit finite state machines without behavioral synthesis abstractions. The project requires testing via cycle-accurate testbenches (GHDL/ModelSim) and FPGA synthesis (e.g., Vivado/Quartus). This requires specialized knowledge in digital logic design, hardware description languages, and microarchitecture.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: 16-bit address bus would require 500K+ flip flops, infeasible on low-cost FPGAs, Using flip flops instead of block RAM limits scalability
Feature requests: 16-bit address bus for better CPU pedagogy and word/address distinction
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 126 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #45 of 127 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 80 days after the earliest competitor.
- We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students · hn · 2026-06-15 · 108 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- I wrote a custom assembler for CHIP-8 in C++ · hn · 2026-09-17 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- SHDL · hn · 2026-01-28 · 48 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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- I built an open-source Linux-capable single-board computer with DDR3 · hn · 2025-12-24 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Axiom · hn · 2026-02-18 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT · hn · 2025-11-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Xcc700: Self-hosting mini C compiler for ESP32 (Xtensa) in 700 lines · hn · 2025-12-26 · 154 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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