A New Old Approach to Teaching Microprocessors: Update and Lessons Learned

In 2009 we described a hands-on approach to teaching microprocessors in which students handwired a Z80-based microprocessor system and programmed it in machine code. The construction of the microprocessor system was accompanied by lectures in a variety of topics including computer organization, instruction set architectures, the Intel family of microprocessors, and high-speed techniques such as pipelining and superscalar processing. The course has now been taught twice and undergone a number of modifications to both the content and the Z80 system built by the students. In this paper we report on those modifications and lessons learned. In addition, we describe three student projects that were based on the Z80 system.