Educational Development Tools for Software and Hardware Processor Design

Creativity of a computer engineer is always sought after due to the increasing demands in the production of embedded systems worldwide. To ensure teaching of computer architecture subject as interesting as possible to computer engineering students, a simulation software for understanding typical computer processors was introduced. For hardware realization, a hardware description language was also taught. In this paper, the design of a real processor was described from the specification to the actualization of the processor using the most affordable and virtually maintenance-free educational software and hardware development tools.