LCP Educational CPUs: From CPLD to FPGA

Adopting simple soft-core processors rather than real CPUs has become a recognized educational approach used by many computer design/architecture courses. Over ten years have passed since we developed a low complexity processor (LCP) targeted to development boards available in our programmable devices’ laboratory. In this paper, we present three successive versions of the LCP developed as part of our ongoing efforts to make the LCP a practical and useful educational tool.