On the Design of a New CPU Architecture for Pedagogical Purposes

Daniel Ellard, David A. Holland, Nicholas Murphy, and Margo Seltzer

2002 Workshop on Computer Architecture Education

Abstract

Ant-32 is a new processor architecture designed specifically to address the pedagogical needs of teaching many subjects, including assembly language programming, machine architecture, compilers, operating systems, and VLSI design. This paper discusses our motivation for creating Ant-32 and the philosophy we used to guide our design decisions and gives a high-level description of the resulting design.