Digital Design and Computer Architecture
This course teaches the fundamentals of digital circuits and computer architecture. It covers everything from transistors and logic gates to instruction set architectures (ISA), microarchitectures, memory systems, and hardware description languages
Instructor: Prof. Onur Mutlu, Lois Orosa (Teaching Assistant) et.al.
Term: Spring
Location: ETH Zürich, HG F7
Time: Lectures on Thursdays 13:15-15:00, Fridays 8:15-10:00
Description
The class provides an introduction to the design of digital circuitry. The class covers the basics of the technical foundations of gates. An introduction to hardware description languages and their use in the design process follows.
Objectives
This class will be your first approach to Computer Architecture. You will study the design of digital circuits in order to:
- understand the basics,
- understand the principles (of design),
- understand the precedents.
Based on such understanding, you will:
- learn how a modern computer works underneath,
- evaluate tradeoffs of different designs and ideas,
- implement a principled design (a simple microprocessor),
- learn to systematically debug increasingly complex systems,
- hopefully develop novel, out-of-the-box designs.
- The focus is on basics, principles, precedents, and how to use them to create/implement good designs.
All details in the website