An Analysis and Validation Toolkit to Support the Undergraduate Course of Computer Organization and Architecture

As an important part of the computer organization and architecture (COA) course, the experiment teaching is generally about the computer system design. Students use the hardware description languages (HDLs) tools to implement the computer system on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based platform. However, the HDLs tools are made for expert hardware engineers and the computer system is a very complex hardware project. It is hard for students to implement their computer system design in the limited lab hours. How to help students get the design validation and find the failure root is important in COA experiment teaching. To this end, an analysis and validation toolkit which is special for COA experiment teaching is designed. For two main steps of FPGA-based hardware design, waveform simulation and on-board testing, two packages were implemented for them respectively. The comparison results of using and not using our toolkit show it improves the effectiveness of experiment teaching greatly.