This isn't quite the same thing, but it kind of reminds me of Altera's Nios soft processor: https://www.altera.com/products/processors/overview.html https://www

This isn't quite the same thing, but it kind of reminds me of Altera's Nios soft processor: https://www.altera.com/products/processors/overview.html https://www.altera.com/products/processors/overview.html In one of my previous lives doing embedded development, we were able able to program the FPGA using pretty plain looking C on the Nios, which just dedicated a portion of the FPGA's gates to running a simple, ARM-like processor. It was cool for us software dudes because we could just do general-purpose computing (mostly) on the FPGA, and the verilog folks would wire it up for us to work right. It's not the cheapest way to design a product, but the stuff I worked on had crazy high profit margins, so it was a fair trade-off for better productivity.