Cool, haven't thought about that. I probably need to get an FPGA. Really liked the book "The Elements of Computing Systems" [1][2] in which one builds a computer from NAND gates upwards, a compiler, vm and finally a simple OS with applications. The hardware part of the course seems to be on coursera now as well. [3]
That's some really neat stuff that I somehow missed in prior research. Thanks for the links. I'm particularly going to have to take another look at the paper that details their methodology for building systems ground up. The abstraction process and samples.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-computing-systems
[2] http://www.nand2tetris.org/
[3] https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer