Tool to support computer architecture teaching and learning

Computer architecture is an important subject for informatics and electrical engineering courses. However, students display some difficulties in this subject, mainly due to the lack of educational tools that are intuitive, versatile and graphical. Existing tools are not adequate enough or are very specific. In this paper, an educational MIPS simulator, DrMIPS, is described. This tool simulates the execution of an assembly program on the CPU and displays the datapath graphically. Registers, data memory and assembled code are also displayed and a “performance mode” is also provided. Both unicycle and pipeline implementations are supported and the CPUs and their instruction sets are configurable. The tool is currently available for PCs and Android tablets, and is fairly intuitive and versatile on both platforms.