In the past I worked on a project with a soft CPU (Altera NIOS) with some custom Verilog written for glue logic. It was nice because the NIOS is just like a gen

In the past I worked on a project with a soft CPU (Altera NIOS) with some custom Verilog written for glue logic. It was nice because the NIOS is just like a generic microcontroller so it's painless to try out some different Verilog blocks without having to interface an external micro. The toolchain is monstrous though, although free versions are available it's just a huge clunker to work with.