I had a similar course, using VHDL going on to Spartan-3E kits (which I still have sitting in a box 14 years later). Our professor gave us three C programs -- w

I had a similar course, using VHDL going on to Spartan-3E kits (which I still have sitting in a box 14 years later). Our professor gave us three C programs -- with the input that would be entered and expected output -- and we had to implement everything to make it work: CPU, VGA output (with "font" definition), keyboard input, and translation of the C programs to our CPU's instruction set. That was a difficult yet extremely rewarding class. My wife, then girlfriend, still remembers that semester because she barely saw me. IIRC, bonus points were given to the team with the highest clock speed. I didn't win, but I seem to remember mine being somewhere in the 18MHz range and the winner in the low to mid 20s.