ECEC 355 Computer Structures Syllabus

Course Description

Covers internal function and organization of digital computers, including instruction set design, machine and assembly language, computer arithmetic, ALU design, central processor organization and implementation. Also covered are interpreters, assemblers, linkers, and loaders.

Course Objectives and Goals

Understand what a compiler, interpreter, assembler, linker and loader does.
Understand the components and format of a machine instruction set.
Be able to write a simple assembly language program.
To be able to understand how an assembly language program executes on a computer.
To understand how a computer represents numbers and performs arithmetic.
To build a simple ALU.
To understand the datapath and control of a simple computer.
To understand how a computer communicates with peripherals.
To quantitatively evaluate the performance of a computer.
Proficiency at measuring and analyzing the performance of software on a given architecture.
To be familiar with advanced features of computer architecture designed to improve performance, such as pipelining, cache, superscalar execution, and parallelism.
To improve the memory and pipeline performance of a program.
To build a pipelined processor, to detect and alleviate pipeline hazards.

Textbooks

Required text: Patterson and Hennessy: Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware / Software Interface – 3rd Edition

Topics

Chapter 1: Computer abstractions and technology
Chapter 2: Instruction set architecture
Chapter 3: Computer arithmetic
Chapter 4: Assessing and understanding performance
Chapter 5: Datapath and control
Chapter 6: Enhancing performance with pipelining
Chapter 7: Memory hierarchy
Chapter 9: Multiprocessors and clusters (time permitting)

Last edited: 09/19/2005 anatole@cs.drexel.edu