Teaching Computer Organization and Architecture Using Simulation and FPGA Applications

This paper presents the design concepts and realization of incorporating micro-operation simulation and FPGA implementation into a teaching tool for computer organization and architecture. This teaching tool helps computer engineering and computer science students to be familiarized practically with computer organization and architecture through the development of their own instruction set, computer programming and interfacing experiments. A two-pass assembler has been designed and implemented to write assembly programs in this teaching tool. In addition to the micro-operation simulation, the complete configuration can be run on Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA board. Such implementation offers good code density, easy customization, easily developed software, small area, and high performance at low cost.