During my Mechanical Engineering Computational Methods class, the professor explained the basic operation of a processor. This re-ignited my interest in the function of low level logic gate operations. Initially I used logic-gate modeling software to try and design basic components like an Arithmetic Logic Unit, but after making some progress I moved to designing these components in Verilog so it could be ported to actual hardware on an FPGA board. After designing a basic adder and instruction set, and defining a simple assembly language to use to perform basic operations, I started bread-boarding the FPGA with small static RAM chips to serve as external memory. While I was able to manually set the bits in the RAM, there was an error with the Verilog memory handler I wrote which prevented writing any data out to memory. After several weeks at a standstill I resolved to wait to finish this project until I had more experience working with FPGAs.