https://www.opencores.com/
There's no PIC cores, but there is an AVR core, though it's written in VHDL, not verilog. There is also a 16bit generic core, and at least one 64 bit core.
Regardless of how helpful the site is I'm sure the OP will still fail their course though =) Implementing one of those cores isn't something you can do over night. There's really not much you can't do with a big enough fast enough FPGA core and a little bit of external drive circuitry. Just browse the projects section, it's amazing the flexibility of one of these things. And they run at hundreds of megahertz. They're not easy to program and they're not cheap though, not really for the hobbyist. Even the modestly priced modules are still in the 50-100 dollar range for the smaller FPGA's, and the development tools tend to cost your first born child.
I think one of the new fads in microprocessor architecture is the "Transfer-triggered" architecture - the only opcode is a move opcode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OISC **broken link removed**
I'd say it would take some balls to hand in project based on that architecture...
Cheap FPGA's are in the $20 range for single unit quantites - if you're careful enough, building a board around one of these isn't too bad. They've got a couple tens of KBytes of memory on chip, and are big enough for simple projects. I think cramming a simple 16 bitter is definitely in hobbyist territory - as long as you are satisifed with speeds in the 2 digit MHz range. Entry level devel tools (verilog + VHDL) are usually free, and usually include a somewhat cripped simulator.
This is what they are taught...while I do not believe it is possible to teach insight and creativity, acedamia only teaches a few tools and not one whit about how to apply them.
https://www.opencores.com/
There's no PIC cores, but there is an AVR core, though it's written in VHDL, not verilog. There is also a 16bit generic core, and at least one 64 bit core.