DOP – A CPU CORE FOR TEACHING BASICS OF COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE.pdf

DOP – A CPU CORE FOR TEACHING BASICS OF COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE Milos Becvar, Alois Pluhacek and Jiri Danecek Department of Computer Science and Engineering Faculty of Electrical Engineering Czech Technical University in Prague, Abstract: A simple 16-bit processor core called DOP and its teaching environment is presented. The DOP processor illustrates the basic principles of computer organization and is therefore used in the introductory hardware course. Its major features are simplicity, availability of an FPGA implementation and a C compiler. This paper presents the description of the core, HW and SW tools and teaching methodology. computing performance. The DOP processor core was 1. INTRODUCTION developed at our department together with various SW and HW visualization tools (Danecek et al., 1994a). An introductory computer hardware course should teach students to the fundamental principles of computer The goal of this paper is to describe this processor core internal functionality. Students, who are familiar with and its learning environment for teaching basics of programming in high-level languages, are required to computer organization. The paper is organized as understand the interaction between a processor, a follows - section 2 outlines the introductory course and memory and I/O devices,