Uso de dispositivos FPGA como apoyo a la enseñanza de asignaturas de arquitectura de computadores

Computer Engineering students in Spanish universities have to take one or more courses devoted to theur learning of computer architecture. The theoretical part of these subjects are usually focused on describing the architecture itself, while practical sessions are used to introduce assembly programming by means of a certain instruction set which runs into a software emulator. This paper proposes to supplement practical sessions, so that students learn to design a microprocessor by themselves from its basic components, by introducing the use of FPGA devices.