Same thing for one of our computer engineering courses at UIUC. Great course, and while it took a long time to do it, it was a great experience (other than the

Same thing for one of our computer engineering courses at UIUC. Great course, and while it took a long time to do it, it was a great experience (other than the fact that we had to do it in Mentor Graphics, which would randomly crash and eat your project). We had assembly programs we had to test against, and it was always really interesting debugging your register stalls. I think mine was a 5-stage processor, MIPS style, so we had to worry about all the pipelining. There were also a standard parts library so everyone was trying to compete against each other to get the best instructions per cycle.