A lab course of computer organization

Lecture topics in Computer Organization courses offered by different Universities around the world do not differ significantly. This is because, in general, lecturers use the same textbooks and are inspired by common curriculum sources. However, lab courses and project assignments require more and more expensive resources (computers, assemblers or assembler simulators, logic circuit simulators, ...) This fact, together with the rapid advance of these tools, causes lab courses to widely differ among universities. This paper summarizes the lab course on Computer Organization offered this year at the Technical University of Valencia, Spain. The course is composed by several experiences and jobs, each one aimed at working on one specific topic. Our goal is not only to introduce the tackled topics, but also to discuss some characteristics of the tools. All the tools used are freely available, which is a must for the students to be more motivated and to be able to extend their work using their own computers at home.