Introduction

Welcome! The Computer System Architecture Lab (CSAL) products are designed to accompany Computer Organization/Architecture courses in the computer science curriculum or in a related curriculum. You can enrich your teaching by choosing one of the four CSAL per-student lab kits below :

• Basic Computer kit (builds a four-instruction simple computer).
• Extended Computer kit (extends the Basic Computer model above with input interrupt processing).
• Extended-Computer++ kit (NEW) (adds to the Extended computer model above an OS multiprogramming function).
• Computer System kit (adds to the Extended-Computer++ model above a process synchronization function).

Each of these kits builds on a breadboard a simple but rich-in-information version of the typical stored-program-computer model shown below:


In the sidebar menu, please click on "Products" for features of the models these kits build, and click on a model name for a detailed model description. (A model computer is built by a student via breadboarding SSI circuit chips such as logic gates, flip-flops, counters, decoders, buffers, etc.).

The new Extended-Computer++ model (as well as the Computer System model) implements an example of a modern-day computer system structure as illustrated below. The purpose here is to present a conceptual framework that shows how {OS, Application Programs, Hardware } components relate to each other and function as parts of a system.


A student constructs a target model computer system through a series of projects that spans an academic quarter or a semester. The lab manual guiding a student is self contained and provides the background knowledge the projects require. A computer model can be built within a department lab and/or outside the lab as a take-home term project. (The basic and extended models are suitable both for an academic quarter or a semester. For it takes longer to build it, one might consider the Computer System model for an academic semester).

The CSAL models are simple enough to make these projects fun, but rich enough to clearly provide for hardware and software level understanding of a stored-program computer system. Further, by familiarizing the student with the actual hardware behind symbolic computer representations, they bring the student to a level where he/she can be easily taught or understand the inner-workings of larger machines with more sophisticated features