From Archi Torture to architecture: Undergraduate students design and implement computers using the Multimedia Logic emulator

Abstract

Students learn better when they both hear and do. In computer architecture courses “doing” can be difficult in small schools without hardware laboratories hosted by computer engineering, electrical engineering, or similar departments. Software solutions exist. Our success with George Mills' Multimedia Logic (MML) is the focus of this paper. MML provides a graphical computer architecture solution with convenient I/O support and the ability to build and emulate a variety of computer designs. It has proven highly motivational to upper division computer science students designing and constructing emulated computers. Student projects resulted in excellent student understanding of the detailed inner workings of computers. Students also developed better teamwork skills and produced useful training aids for the lower division computer organization class. Designs implemented include 8 bit and 16 bit von Neumann and Harvard architectures, from single cycle to 12 cycle instructions. Issues resolved during the learning process include timing, initialization, instruction set architecture, and I/O and assembler design. We discuss pedagogical issues involved in using MML to implement instructor and student computer designs. MML is compared to using a hardware-based Intel 8085 microprocessor basic systems course.

Acknowledgements

Three students are co-authors of this paper. Other students involved in the two design projects featured included George Embrey, Scott Mikolyski, and Darren Salomons. These projects were team efforts and the other members not participating in authorship are gratefully acknowledged. The authors also thank Xuan Thanh Quach for redesign of the 8 bit Harvard architecture to use a multiplexer page. Other projects and teams in the class were the hardware team (Alex Daw, Wing Ho, and Masae Myoga), the Microcode Alarm Clock Team (Keith Radin and Deepak Shrestha), and the Matching Game Team (Willy Mariteragi and Samuel Raapoto). The authors gratefully acknowledge George Mills, the author of Multimedia Logic, for making his logic simulation package available without cost and including the source code on his web site (http://www.softronix.com/).