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 three CSAL per-student lab kits:

• Computer System Kit (NEW)
• Basic Computer Kit
• Extended Computer Kit

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 corresponding model name for a detailed model description.

The new kit that offers the richest functionality (i.e., the Computer System Kit) would also support an Operating Systems class for it implements an example of a modern-day computer system structure illustrated below. The purpose here is not to teach in-depth OS functionality but to present a conceptual framework that clearly shows what the illustrated components are and how they relate to each other and function as parts of a system. This kit also implements process synchronization primitives “signal” and “wait” and shows how and when to use them.


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 these projects do not require electrical/computer engineering expertise. A computer model can be built within a department lab and/or outside the lab as a take-home term project.

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