[oc] Resources for Project

[Joshua Grauman <jgrauman@wormhole.youthonfire.com>]

Hi, I would like to design a CPU for a Masters Thesis and have a few
questions. First, a brief description of what I had in mind:

I want to design a reconfigurable 16-bit Microcontroller. My thinking
was that I would design a CPU with the idea that it would be embedded
into an application, and depending on the application, some remainder
of the CPU could be hardware programmed to perform specific functions.
I was also thinking of making the CPU hardware multitasking (it would
have a fixed number of "threads" and the hardware would multiplex them
automatically. Other features and ideas would be added as needed...

My problem is that I do not have the resources needed. I was wondering
what suggestions people had for attacking such a problem. I was thinking
that I would do the design in VHDL, and implement it on an FPGA. Does
anyone have suggestions for the program I could use? I would be willing
to spend some money, but I realize that for this type of a project most
commercial products are too expensive. Would it be possible to simply
get a FPGA and program it using JTAG using my parallel port? Where can
I get an FPGA, and which one should I get? Can some FPGAs reprogram
themselves, or is external hardware needed to reconfigure only a certain
part of the FPGA?

Sorry for the long email. Any other relevant comments would be appreciated
as well. Of course I would like to open source my core. Thanks for any 
and all comments.

Joshua Grauman
joshua@grauman.com