Design And Research Of Computer Core Curriculum Experiments Based On FPGA

At present the core curriculums of computer in most colleges and universities are independently. On account of lacking connection and interaction in different courses, the students are very difficult to establish a whole concept of computer. So, we design an experimental platform of the computer core curriculum NCEPU_SOC_COMCORE. The platform uses FPGA as the core and includes the storage systems, communication systems, and I/O systems. This platform can realize experiments of Digital Circuit, Principle of Computer Organization, Computer Architecture, Operating System, and Compiler Principle.The main purpose of this paper is to design the experiments of core curriculums and establish the hardware and software systems, which are required by the NCEPU_SOC_COMCORE experiment platform. The hardware and software systems in this experimental platform includes the NCEPU_SPARC8 RISC processor, which comes from LEON3 soft-core based on SPARC V8 architecture and 32-bit RISC instruction set equipped with peripheral meet the AMBA specification; NCEPU_LINUX, an operating system which is cut from SnapGear Linux to match the NCEPU_SPARC V8 RISC processor; and NFS root file system, aiming to realize a dynamic program loading. Based on the analysis of experiments of curriculums, typical experiments of each course are designed. Other experiments can also be designed according to the model of the design of typical experiments. In this paper, we talk about the design of the experiment of calculator from the course of Principle of Computer Organization. The component library required in the experiments built using the VHDL language to implement functional design, the tri-state gate control to design bus interface and the ISE to convert the functional module to a schematic format. Operating System selects the page replacement algorithm experiments of storage management. Compile Principle selects the parsing experiment and designs a calculator parser by using YACC. NCEPU_SOC_COMCORE platform strengthens the connection and reduces the redundancy among different courses. NCEPU_SOC_COMCORE platform also can reduce the time that students need to adapt to different experimental platforms and enhance the students’ understanding about the computer system.