Design Space Exploration of Embedded Processors in Computer Architecture Education using T&D-Bench

We present T&D-Bench, Teaching and Design Workbench, a framework for design space exploration of embedded processors. Design space exploration has become a fundamental phase of the SOC (system on a chip) design process in industry and in research, and so it is important also in computer architecture education. T&D-Bench is an innovative framework to be employed in computer architecture education, providing the students a contact with a contemporary hardware design activity, and offering an easy and rapid design process, together with graphical user interface resources for tracking and steering the experiments with the processor models. T&D-Bench has been used at Universidade de Caxias do Sul since 2003 with positive results reported by the students, both beginners and seniors. T&D-Bench is available as an open source and platform-independent framework on the Internet