DCMSIM: didactic cache memory simulator

We present a functional and structural didactic simulator of cache memory systems developed at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The development occurred during the undergraduate Computer Architecture discipline, in the Computer Science course. Its implementation is one part of a new didactic method, in which developers (students of the Computer Architecture discipline) must learn the concepts and theory of the discipline topics to correctly apply them in the simulator. In our simulator, DCMSim, there are features to allow students to construct and verify knowledge, testing and comparing several different configurations and memory access traces.