ECS 154A COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE (4) I, II, III
Lecture: 3 hoursDiscussion: 1 hour
Prerequisites: Course ECS 50 or EEC 70, and course ECS 110
Grading: Letter; two midterms (20% each), final exam (40%) and programming and digital design work (20%)
Catalog Description:
Introduction to digital design. Interfacing of devices for I/O,
memory and memory management. Input/output programming, via wait loops,
hardware interrupts and calls to operating system services. Hardware support
for operating systems software. Only one unit of credit allowed for students
who have taken EEC 170.
Expanded Course Description:
- Combinational and Sequential Digital Design
Boolean algebra, gates. Commonly used MSI circuits such as multiplexers and decoders. Simple arithmetic circuits. Latches and flip-flops. Use of simple digital design simulation software to aid in hierarchical system development. - Input/Output Programming
Memory-mapped versus separate-address-space I/O. I/O devices. Hardware interrupts. I/O programming--wait-loop, interrupt-driven, and via calls to operating system services--for keyboard, video and file access. - Interfacing
Synchronous and asynchronous buses. Bus arbitration. Coprocessors. Hardware for I/O, memory and memory-managerment. Decoding of system-level to chip-level addresses. - Hardware for Support of Operating Systems
Hardware support to optimize resource usage, and to implement the abstraction of a separate machine for each user. The role of hardware interrupts to support a timesharing OS. Use of memory-management hardware, either within-CPU or via separate MMU, to support efficient and convenient OS memory allocation.
Textbooks:
D. Patterson and J. Hennessy, Computer Organization and Design Hardware/Software the Interface, Elsevier HSS, 2003
Brown, Fundamentals of Digital Logic Custom, McGraw-Hill, 2000
Computer Usage:
Extensive programming and digital design simulation assignments.
Engineering Design Statement:
Students in the course write sophisticated, systems-level programs
according to their own design. They also do extensive development of digital
circuitry (via a simulator), again according to their own design, and analyze
the performance of such circuitry.
ABET Category Content:
Engineering Science: 2 units
Engineering Design: 2 units
Goals:
Students will:
- learn the foundational concepts of digital design, interfacing of devices for I/O, memory and memory management
- learn input/output programming and hardware support for operating systems software
Program Outcomes:
- The ability to apply knowledge of basic science, mathematics and engineering principles to solve computing and information processing problems
- The ability to understand the relationship between hardware and software
- The ability to understand the tradeoffs in the design of hardware systems, software systems, processes and components
- The ability to acquire the foundations to be a life-long learner
Instructors: M. Farrens, N. Matloff, B. Mukherjee
Prepared by: M. Farrens, N. Matloff, R. Olsson (Nov. 1996)
Overlap Statement:
This course does not duplicate any existing course.
5/06