Design of A Microsoft Version of MIPS Microprocessor Simulator

Abstract

We describe the implementation of a MIPS Simulator called MIPS-SIM. MIPS-SIM is a GUI, Java-based simulator for the MIPS assembly language. MIPS, the computer architecture is widely used in industry and is the basis of the popular textbook Computer Organization and Design by David Patterson and John Hennessy, used at over 400 universities. The third edition of this text (published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2005) uses standard 32-bit MIPS as the primary teaching ISA. The MIPS-SIM simulator has been implemented for educational purposes with characteristics that are especially useful to undergraduate computer science and engineering students and their instructors who use the above textbook. MIPS-SIM should be useful in courses such as computer organization and architecture, assembly language programming, and compiler writing. MIPS-SIM implements almost the entire MIPS32 assembler-extended instruction set. MIPS-SIM also provides a simple debugger and minimal set of operating system services. We test MIPS-SIM simulator by running several MIPS assembly programs. Results prove the accuracy, correctness, effectiveness and usefulness of MIPS-SIM.