Using LC-3 soft core on an FPGA development board for microprocessor labs

Abstract

In this study, a Little Computer 3 (LC-3) core is ported to Altera's Cyclone III FPGA on the DE0 development board. DE0 input/output devices such as seven-segment display, LED, switch, GPIO devices, and Lego Mindstorms NXT devices are added as memory-mapped devices. The LC-3 core was designed with VHDL on Quartus II 9.0 Web Edition. The input/output devices on DE0 can be manipulated by LC-3 instructions. With these additional devices in LC-3, more diversified and interesting labs can be designed. Students can first test their programs on the simulator and then on DE0. This should add more fun to learning assembly language programming and computer organization and flatten the learning curve. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.