EC362 Computer Architecture

Catalog Data & Credits (Recitation-Lab-Total)

EC362 Computer Architecture (3-2-4): This course covers organization, structure, and design of computers, starting with a review of the history of computers. Design topics include: complex and reduced instruction set design; data addressing; design of central processing units, registers, and arithmetic logic units that covers two's complement addition and subtraction, and multiplication; circuits to handle exceptions: data busses; memory system design; input/output system design; fixed-point and floating-point hardware, pipelining design. VHDL implementation of a processor, and performance analysis.

Pre-requisites

Course Objectives

1. Use digital techniques to analyze and design circuits implementing an instruction set architecture for a reduced instruction set computer using pipelining as a technique to increase computer speed.
2. Interpret various schemes for accessing memory, including PC relative, register indirect, and with offsets for data.
3. Write assembly language programs for a reduced instruction set computer and manually convert them into corresponding machine language instructions.
4. Present designs and solutions to problems in writing, using clear and well thought out English, mathematics, tables, graphs, and figures.
5. Be able to design digital circuits to perform arithmetic on numbers in various integer and floating-point formats.
6. Design and analyze memory cache systems using associative-mapped, indirect-mapped, and block-set associative designs.