Future Directions in Computer Architectures Curricula: Silicon Compilation for Hardware/software Co-design

Courses in Computer Architectures are increasingly becoming restricted to Electronics and Computer Engineering degrees rather than Computer Science degrees, as Computer Science and Software Engineering expands and student demand increasingly favours software rather than hardware aspects. As a result, a declining proportion of Computing students understand the relationships between software structures and their corresponding hardware implementation and performance critical issues in embedded systems and hardware-software co-design. In an attempt to redress this balance, we propose a new top-down Computer Architectures course structure that uses silicon compilation as an abstraction to present Computer Architectures in a top-down C-software-oriented format. This approach allows first year undergraduate Computing (and Electronics) students to directly implement and modify minimal processor architectures in a C-language form, without the necessity to explicitly learn assembly language programming or a microprocessor programming environment.