ESCAPE: environment for the simulation of computer architectures for the purpose of education

We have developed ESCAPE, an easy-to-use, highly interactive portable PC-based simulation environment aimed at the support of computer architecture education. The environment can simulate both a microprogrammed architecture and a pipelined architecture with single pipeline. Both architectures are custom-made, with a certain amount of configurability. Other tools, such as a memory monitor, assembler/disassembler and analysis tools, such as on-the-fly generation of pipeline activity and usage diagrams, are integrated with the environment. Based upon our limited experience with the material so far, we can state that the results are excellent. Students invariantly respond very positively, and the evaluations indicate a far deeper understanding than was previously attainable by using only the traditional textbook-and-paper-problems approach.