Computer Architecture

What you’ll study

Basic components of a computer and a microprocessor — registers, control section and ALU. Digital design basics: data representation — fixed and floating-point (IEEE 754) numbers; arithmetic circuits — adders, subtractors and overflow, magnitude comparators, decoders and multiplexers; flip-flops and latches, registers and register files; sequential circuits — finite state machine representation, serial adder, synchronous counter design, timing methodology. Processor architecture: the basic accumulator-based CPU, RISC and CISC processors, instruction sets and addressing modes, the basic MIPS instruction set. Arithmetic circuits: carry-look-ahead and carry-save adders, Booth's algorithm, restoring and non-restoring division, array multipliers and dividers. Fixed-point ALUs; pipelined processing. Datapath and control design: single-cycle and multi-cycle implementation of a MIPS subset, hardwired and micro-programmed control, pipelined datapath, data and control hazards. Cache memory: associative, direct and set-associative mapping. System organization: buses, bus arbitration, I/O control, interrupts and Direct Memory Access.