About
CompSim - The Computer Simulator is a virtual environment for practical learning in Computer Organization and Architecture. CompSim includes an integrated approach to support studies and designs of concepts related to hardware components, such as functions, interaction models and low-level programming.
CompSim includes a virtual hardware platform, called "Mandacaru", which includes a conceptual processor, cache and RAM memories, system and peripheral buses, as well input (Keyboard) and output (Video) devices. These virtual components are designed to support the study of different concepts of Computer Organization and Architecture, such as the instruction cycle phases, data representation in memory, instruction set architectures (types, sizes and formats of instructions), addressing modes, machine-level programming, representation of high-level language constructions, calculation of data access times, among others.
CompSim also has a graphical user interface that allows configuring the components of the Mandacaru platform, programming an application for execution in the conceptual processor, configuring, executing and visualizing the simulation, as well as analyzing the system performance.
Among the CompSim resources, we can mention:
- Code Editor is used to support coding of a new application at low level for execution in the simulator;
- Platform configuration allows the creation and configuration of a virtual hardware platform;
- Views can be used to show, at simulation time, the status of the virtual hardware components;
- Assembler is used to validate a new low-level program (by lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis) and generate a binary executable program;
- Performance analysis tools are used to support platform and application optimizations;
- Integration with Arduino for supporting creation of real eletronics projects;
- And more.