Hands-on Experience for Teaching Computer Architecture
Résumé
Teaching computer architecture in our School of Electrical Engineering (Supélec) includes both lectures and practical projects. Regarding the practical projects (each about 50 hours of work) three different pedagogical computers have been defined. The first one is very simple: it has only eight instructions and two addressing modes. It emphasizes the very basic concepts of computer architecture, and all our first-year students must design and build it after completing a course on the fundamentals of combinational and sequential logic. The second pedagogical computer has a more complex architecture and all the senior computer science majors have to design and build either a PDP/11-like or a stack-based microprogrammed processor. The third processor our majors have to design and build is a pipelined RISC processor, including their choice of trade-offs between hardware and software as part of their task. The building part of the projects, which have all to end up with a fully working processor, is possible in the rather short time available by using a pedagogical hardware toolkit which has been developed in our lab for that purpose. This toolkit has been designed to allow students to concentrate on the functional characteristics of digital devices by reducing the practical constraints induced by real circuits to a minimum (fan-in and fan-out, short-circuits, wiring, layout , etc.). We are currently developing more advanced add-on devices for the toolkit to allow students to explore further concepts of modern architectures, such as the cooperation of processors in multi-processor arrays. More information on the contents of the projects, the reactions of the students and the design of the toolkit are given below.
Domaines
Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)