Create Your Own WIMP51 Processor: Project Based Experience to Learn Basic Computer Architecture Development and Organizational Skills

The Digital Systems Design course, at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), concentrates on teaching, sophomore, and junior level students, about design of embedded systems using microcontrollers.Most of the course content concentrates on understanding the internal structure of the chosen family of microcontroller and building applications around a specific microcontroller.In order to expose students to computer architecture development and organization skills, the course, also, concentrates on teaching a typical internal architecture, the 8051's smaller subset, Weekend Instructional Microprocessor (WIMP51), which is rudimentary in design and has a small instruction set.The recreated WIMP51, built using Altera's Quartus II design software's schematic capture, in Block Diagram Files (BDF), provides better visualization of its internal hardware.The processor can be downloaded, onto the FPGA board, and tested using multiple programs, which helps students understand its internal functioning.This platform allows for the implementation of a major class project, in which students are required to create their own version of the WIMP51 processor, by adding a single or multiple instructions, depending on complexity, to the current instruction set.This paper briefly discusses the modified implementation of the WIMP51 processor and presents detailed implementation of the mentioned course project.