The embedded operating system design on a reconfigurable modular hardware for educational purpose

An old Chinese proverb says ?I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember; I do, and I understand?. As is understood from this expression, the most ideal learning about a topic is to put into practice the theoretical knowledge learned. Computer Organization and Operating Systems courses play a significant role in the Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering and similar disciplines. To convert practice the concepts handled in these courses are among the problems of today?s education system. It has been produced hardware and software based solutions to eliminate the need for application in these courses using technology. The educational tools prepared for operating systems course is insufficient in terms of the motivation of original system design compared with computer organization and architecture course In addition to these solutions, it has been brought new approach using FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array) development environments. The educational tools solution developed by using FPGA development environments brought about observable, executable and tangible structures under real world conditions instead of the ideal conditions in the simulation environment. The computer architecture developed using an emulator program that we designed in 2009 is embedded to the FPGA development board by including the modular approach in this thesis. The modular approach allowed the effect for enhancing motivation to users by bringing involving feature in especially computer architecture and organization course. In other words, it is user friendly that since the user defined design does not cause any negative effect at the process of system and to be able to integrate their designs instead of a component of the system. In this way, the user will obtain the own computer architecture by changing the related system?s components with the user defined designs without getting lost in the complexity. Also we have prepared a user guide how to design an operating system on hardware based computer architecture from scratch. The developed operating system is written using assembly language of our computer architecture named BZK.SAU and presented an educational tool to the literature.