Target Audience

• This is a required course for all degree-seeking undergraduate students in EE and CSE.
• An understanding of the material in this course is strongly recommended for all students who intend to take ECE 568/668 in Computer Architecture.

Overall goals of ECE 232

• Acquire the ability to use a hierarchical (layered) approach to understand a complex system
• Hardware
• Software
• This ability is useful in many EE courses and on the job
• Acquire skills to program in assembly language
• Understand the principals of hardware software interface
• Learn the principles of datapath and control design for scalar, pipelined computer systems
• Understand memory hierarchy and the principles of virtual memory
• Become aware of current design issues and concerns

Course Outline

1. Introduction

· Terminologies

· Hardware, Software, Interface

· The computer design process and scope of the course

· Moore’s law and historical perspective

· Application of computer design principles in other designs

2. Arithmetic for Computers

· Signed and Unsigned numbers

· Binary Addition and Subtraction

· Improving adder performance using Carry Look Ahead and Carry Select Adders

· Multiplying signed and unsigned numbers

· IEEE floating point number representation

· Using Verilog for design

3. MIPS instructions

· Basic organization

· Von Neumann machine, memory, registers

· Data movement

· Logical operations

· Arithmetic operations

· Instructions for making decisions

· Supporting procedures in hardware

· MIPS addressing

· Translating and starting a program

· Writing recursive program in assembly language

· Using SPIM simulator

4. Understanding Performance

· CPU performance factors

· Basic performance evaluation

5. Processor Datapath and Control Design

· Simple implementation scheme

· Multicycle datapath implementation

· Control system design using state machines

· Pipelined datapath

· Pipelined control

· Data Hazards and stalls

· Branch Hazards

6. Memory Hierarchy

· The basics of Cache

· Measuring and improving cache performance

· Virtual memory

7. Storage and IO sub-systems

· Disk storage and dependability

· Direct mapped and memory mapped IO

· Simple peripheral control design

8. Overview of contemporary issues

· Power issues

· Superscalar architecture

· Multi-core design: benefits and disadvantages