Short while back I discoverd what a FPGA is, basically you can program a circuit,
this FPGA chip has a lots of cores that are programmable , you can say in this core
I want this type of circuitry , that's so crazy ,but awesome concept, you can just program the circuits??? nothing is hard wired ,it really does gives interesting possibilities. It blurs the line between hardware and software. This is absolutey great for prototyping ,instead of making custom boards for each proto ,you can use the base board ,you just reprogram the circuit for your own needs.
I think it would be cool to build you own cpu ,with it's own instruction set
and making a compiler that can turn the user source into the cpu instruction set so that the cpu can run it. That could be an interesting side quest. It certainly would enhance my understanding on the tech that we daily use.
-MK