I did a course like this while on exchange programme to UCSB! In the ECE 152B Digital Design Methodologies class, teams of 2 people had to design and build a CP

I did a course like this while on exchange programme to UCSB! In the ECE 152B Digital Design Methodologies class, teams of 2 people had to design and build a CPU from scratch. We had to choose all our own chips and wire them together by hand. We had an FPGA for the Control Unit, but had to design the bus, pipelining, stack, carry-borrow, all the way up to running a demonstration program. We did that in teams of 2 people, with only 1 semester. I was broke, so we chose the cheapest chips (I built MUXes out of NANDs). I realised we couldn't finish on time. I wandered the hallways, saw a project poster from a previous year, took some photos, reverse-engineered and reimplemented their design. We didn't have the FPGA code, but knowing the breadboard layout helped enormously. A few more nights in the lab, working to exhaustion and sleeping under the desk, and we passed the class. If you think industrial espionage only happens in other countries, that taught me that it happens in the US too. Arguably we made enough changes that it wasn't total plagiarism, but it did help to have a known-working design to build on. The most lasting memory of that project, though, was when it worked fine during debugging, but failed whenever we removed the test probes. We were using 2 breadboards, but no common GND. During programming, they were grounded together through the GND on the PC's USB port. Always check for a common ground!