ENEE446: Digital Computer Design | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Credits: 3

Description

Prerequisite: ENEE350; and completion of all lower-division technical courses in the EE curriculum.

Restriction: Permission of ENGR-Electrical & Computer Engineering department.

Credit only granted for: ENEE446 or CMSC411.

Hardware design of digital computers. Arithmetic and logic units, adders, multipliers and dividers. Floating-point arithmetic units. Bus and register structures. Control units, both hardwired and microprogrammed. Index registers, stacks, and other addressing schemes. Interrupts, DMA and interfacing.

Semesters Offered

Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025

Testudo

Learning Objectives

Introduction to quantitative principles of digital computer design
Understanding the architecture of current digital computers
Contemporary issues in computer architecture
A developmental understanding of computer architecture
Current and potential roles for parallelism in computer architecture

Topics Covered

Principles of computer design
Cost/performance of design options
Processor design
Instruction set design and implementation
Pipelining and instruction-level parallelism
Floating-point arithmetic
Memory-hierarchy design: caches, main memory, virtual memory
Input/output design and performance measures, types of I/O devises, connections of I/O to CPU and main memory
The increasing role of parallelism from fine-grained to coarse-grained; what forms of parallelisms appear to be easier for programmers