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An FPGA‐based integrated environment for computer architecture
Author(s) -
Bulić Patricio,
Guštin Veselko,
Šonc Damjan,
Štrancar Andrej
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
computer applications in engineering education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.478
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 1099-0542
pISSN - 1061-3773
DOI - 10.1002/cae.20448
Subject(s) - debugging , computer science , field programmable gate array , microprocessor , embedded system , pipeline (software) , computer hardware , software , arm architecture , operating system
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. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21: 26–35, 2013