Computer Architecture

Class Overview

This course provides a comprehensive foundation of modern computer system architecture insights and principles. The course is structured around the three primary building blocks of general-purpose computing systems: processors, memories, and networks. The first half of the course focuses on the fundamentals of each building block, with topics like processor microcoding and pipelining; cache microarchitecture and optimization; and network topology, routing, and flow control. The second half of the course delves into more advanced techniques, which can be integrated to build a modern shared-memory multicore system. Topics include superscalar execution, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, register renaming and memory disambiguation; VLIW, vector, and multithreaded processors; memory protection, translation, and virtualization; and memory synchronization, consistency, and coherence. Throughout the semester, students will gradually design, implement, test, and evaluate a complete multicore system capable of running real parallel applications at the register-transfer level. This course provides an introduction to the design and implementation of digital circuits and microprocessors. Topics include transistor network design, Boolean algebra, combinational circuits, sequential circuits, finite state machine design, processor pipelines, and memory hierarchy. Design methodology using both discrete components and hardware description languages is covered in the laboratory portion of the course.

Prerequisites: Prerequisite: ECE 3140/CS 3420 or CS 3410. Students should feel comfortable working with a hardware description language such as Verilog, SystemVerilog, or VHDL.
Key Topics: Verilog, ROM & RAM Memory, Parallel Computing