Note: The following provides a suggested course description, objectives, and an outline. These may be modified pending discussion with the Faculty Chairs, proposing faculty, and other curriculum reviewers.
Course Description: An introduction to the principles of computer architecture. Introduces modern techniques for high-speed computing. Discussion of pipelining, cache memory, main memory architecture, and disk arrays. A brief introduction to a hardware design language.
Course Objectives: To provide an introduction to the basics of computer architecture in preparation for more advanced work in architecture, compilers, and operating systems.
Course Outline by Topical Areas:
- The computer as a finite-state machine: from flip-flops and gates to a simple computer.
- Introduction to computer architecture.
- The various parts of a computer: CPU, memory, disks.
- Pipelining to speed up computation.
- Cache memory.
- Main memory
- Basics of VHDL, a hardware design language.
