Computer design education with NSL

We developed an educational method to design computer. In this method, students are given an example CPU circuit. They are required to find out improvement method of the CPU, implement them and evaluate the performance. Trough this process, they understand computer design actively. Students implement with NSL (Next Synthesis Language). NSL is a kind of HDL (Hardware Description Language) and has high affinity with the object-oriented language like UML. C language-like syntax helps easy understanding for beginners to design computer. All of students who took this computer design course were master class students. However, no one had any experience to design computer at all. Nonetheless, they could understand pipeline, branch prediction, cache, and superscalar and implement them with NSL in a short time (45 hours) effectively because they could modify computer design easily with NSL. Our educational method could cover CE 2004 (Computer Engineering) [7], which is one of the standard curriculums provided by IEEE CS and ACM, almost 50%. This paper will describe our educational method to design computer with NSL.