BZK.SAU.FPGA10.0: Microprocessor architecture design on reconfigurable hardware as an educational tool

Abstract

The Computer Architecture and Organization course in Computer and Electrical Engineering departments faces with a big problem: the migration from theory to practice. In order to solve this problem, a Computer Architecture simulator named BZK.SAU[1] is designed using an emulator program for educational purpose. This approach has important limitations. While students can complete and simulate their designs using software, they do not have the chance to implement and to run their designs in actual hardware. This work presents our solution to this problem: the FPGA implementation of BZK.SAU so that it would look and behave like the computer architecture simulator published in [1]. So we have implemented BZK.SAU Computer Architecture Simulator by using Altera® FPGA board that is a reconfigurable hardware prototyping development platform.