Course Descriptions and Syllabi

CS 231: Computer Organization

A study of the basic components of a computer, with emphasis on the hardware-software interface. Performance considerations will be used to examine the instruction set architecture and the design of the datapath of a RISC processor. Topics include: Boolean algebra, combinational and sequential logic, state machines; assembly language, parameter passing conventions; single and multiple clock cycle implementations of datapath; performance metrics (MIPS, MFLOPS, CPI)---their use and abuse; representation of floating point numbers, hardware for various arithmetic operations; pipelining, microprogramming, compiler optimizations. Depending on the time available, some subset of these other topics may be covered: the memory hierarchy, caching, paging, segmentation; I/O devices, device drivers, traps, exceptions, interrupts, DMA.

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