Yes, I have still quite some fun with FPGAs. I am interested into open source tooling, e.g., using Chisel and want to look into yosys.
Redesign of JOP: 1. switch from VHDL to Chisel, 2. change the cache to be able to read one bytecode per clock cycle, 3. maybe some bytecode fusion (executing more than one per clock cycle), 4. time-predictable branch prediction.
Jazelle was intended for mobile phones to support Java apps on the phone. I had a phone with Jazelle and it run Java quite fast those days. But since Apple killed Java on the phone with the iPhone with native apps from the App Store and no Java support, this was the end for Jazelle.
The JOP served me well for years of research work, but only little commercial success. This project is kind of stalled. JOP’s strength was worst-case execution time, not average case speed. No Java processor beats JIT on a modern Intel processor.