The objective of this thesis was to develop a generic microprocessor design that can be adapted to many of the existing 16 bit microprocessors. Common features of various microprocessors were used to develop the design of many generic components which can then be used to design the required microprocessors instead of custom-designing each one of them separately. The components were designed using a CISC based micro-programmed design approach as that was more suitable in terms of design and verification time for generic implementation. The generic parts designed include the Register File for temporary data storage, the Effective Address Calculator that generates the effective address for the operand, the Barrel Shifter for fast multiply/divide operations and the Priority Encoder for determining the processor state.