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 13:15-15:00
Description
The class provides a first introduction to the design of digital circuits and computer architecture. It covers technical foundations of how a computing platform is designed from the bottom up. It introduces various execution paradigms, hardware description languages, and principles in digital design and computer architecture. The focus is on fundamental techniques employed in the design of modern microprocessors and their hardware/software interface.
Objectives
This class provides a first approach to Computer Architecture. The students learn the design of digital circuits in order to:
- understand the basics,
- understand the principles (of design),
- understand the precedents (in computer architecture).
Based on such understanding, the students are expected to:
- learn how a modern computer works underneath, from the bottom up,
- evaluate tradeoffs of different designs and ideas,
- implement a principled design (a simple microprocessor),
- learn to systematically debug increasingly complex systems,
- hopefully be prepared to 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