CARD: Syllabus

  1. Fundamentals:
    1. Review of logic design and implementation technologies
    2. From simple combinational logic to state machines for sequential circuits
    3. Logic design using Verilog and introduction to FPGAs.
    4. Register Transfer Level design principles; registers, clocks, timing budgets, setup and hold margins, clock skew, clock-domain crossing and synchronization, metastability.
    5. Quantitative computer architecture; performance evaluation methods and metrics, principles of high-performance design.
  2. Processor Architecture:
    1. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) design; instruction set classes, registers, memory addressing.
    2. RISC vs CISC, how the ISA supports high-level languages, quantitative approach to ISA design.
    3. Example ISAs (e.g. MIPS, RISC-V).
    4. ISA requirements for embedded systems.
    5. Pipelined processor design; pipeline hazards and interlocks, control prediction techniques and their usage.
    6. Out-of-order execution; scoreboards, reservation stations, register renaming, quantitative analysis of performance.
  3. Computer Arithmetic and ALU Design:
    1. Introduction to binary arithmetic functions; fixed-point addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
    2. Advanced techniques in computer arithmetic; carry-look ahead adders, parallel-prefix adders, Booth-coded multipliers, Wallace and Dadda trees.
    3. Sub-word parallelism.
    4. fractional fixed-point multiply- accumulate operations.
    5. Floating-point computations; IEEE standard, floating-point addition and multiplication, high-performance fused-multiply-add architectures.
  4. Memory System Design:
    1. Memory hierarchies; review of principles, quantitative analysis of memory hierarchy performance; exploring the design space of cache parameters.
    2. Main memory design; Interfacing between processor and memory, synchronous and asynchronous bus protocols.
    3. Error detection and correction schemes; parity, Hamming codes, SECDED.
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