Nano8

Welcome to the Nano8 General-Purpose Computer Project. The goal of this project is to balance a simple design and complex functionallity. Currently the project is still in it's planning phase so there isn't really much to see. The following is an overview of what I plan to achieve:

Nano8 Core

The Core is an 8-bit CPU with high performance specs:

• 8 bit data and 16-bit internal addresses
• 24 bit MMU -> up to 16MiB of storage
• (hopefully) vector based interrupts
• high clock speed design (hupefully 20 MHz on the 74AC IC implementation)
• 2 stage pipeline (simple instruction prefetching mechanism)
• space efficient and elegant ISA
• Native stack operations
• Some way to handle 16-bit values (incomplete 16-bit support [not for ALU])
• Instruction decoder without ROM

Nano8 GPU (maybe)

There will defenitely be a VGA interface, but if I will decide to mak it more complex this will be the features:

• low resolution colored images and videos
• medium resolution 2 color images and videos
• sprite redering
• multiple supported video interfaces (VGA, SPI, I2C and maybe more)

Nano8 Computer

The computer will hopfully be a slightly modular motherboard that contains all components and can connect to external peripherals. These are teh main specs:

• 24-bit addresses with 8/16-bit data interface (16 bit only for special read ops like instruction fetching)
• modular clock and power unit (3 clock sources, clock division and voltage from ~2.5V to 6V)
• parallel extention bus
• (possible) serial extension bus

NanOS

The computers operating system will most likely be called NanOS or NanoOS. It will be afully fletched multitasking OS with the following features:

• multitasking
• colored terminal interface
• file system
• sufficient suit of applications (basic utils, text editor, assambler, ...)

Implementations

There will be multiple different implementation for this computer. Maybe I won't complete all of them, but I plan the following implementations:

• Breadboard (development)
• Logisim Evolution Simulation (development)
• PCB (only for the finalized version)
• FPGA (hopefully really fast)
• Emulator (blazingly fast, written in Rust)

Project Structure

The project structure is split into 4 sections:

• Documentation (docs/)
  • User manuals
  • Data Sheet
  • Education material
• Implementations (implementations/)
  • Folders for every single implementation
• Software (software/)
  • The OS and it's programs
  • Bare Metal Applications
  • Test programs
• Tools (tools/)
  • Core Rust library
  • CLI applications (binutils, assembler, ...)