An Educational Hardware/Software Tool for the First Course in Computer Architecture

In this paper, we briefly present our design decisions and challenges involved in designing the hardware/software tools that we prepared based on our several years of experience in teaching logic circuits and computer architecture which help students of the first course in computer architecture to familiarize themselves with the basic operations of a computer. In fact, we first present the hardware of an 8-bit processor and its I/O and memory board that we have specifically designed and built using basic logic ICs for pedagogical purposes. We then go over the features and design challenges of a special monitor program we created. This monitor program directly runs on the top of our 8-bit processor and provides invaluable features, such as executing the students’ program in two possible modes (single step and continuous run), displaying the contents of CPU registers, flags, and relevant memory locations, in addition to the ability to pause the program execution on real hardware, and modify these contents and continue.