An FPGA-based integrated environment for computer architecture

We present a new, integrated environment used in computer-architecture education. The environment consists of a hardware platform and GUI software running on a PC. The hardware platform is entirely implemented in Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA. The main part of the hardware platform is a 32-bit pipelined RISC processor with a trace/debug unit. This trace/debug unit is a hardware unit that enables debugging and transfers the pipeline contents to the PC. It also enables communication between the GUI application on the PC and the microprocessor core. Such a system makes it possible to download the students' programs to the FPGA-based microprocessor and graphically depicts the processor's internal state on the PC. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21: 2635, 2013