Computer Organization And Design

Catalog description

INTRODUCTION TO MAJOR COMPONENTS OF A COMPUTER SYSTEM, HOW THEY FUNCTION TOGETHER IN EXECUTING A PROGRAM, HOW THEY ARE DESIGNED. CMPEN 331 Computer Organization and Design (3) The goals of the course are to introduce students to the major components of a computer system (the data path, the control path, the memory system, the I/O system), how they function together in executing a program, and how they are designed. The relationships between instruction set design, addressing modes, fetch and execute operations, and their impact on the underlying architecture are presented. Students will develop skills both in assembly language programming and in designing architecture components in a hardware description language (VHDL or verilog). CMPEN 331 is a required course for both computer engineering and computer science majors. CMPEN 331 requires access to PCs/workstations with commercial hardware description language tools (e.g., Synopsys VSS compiler and simulator) and a modern assembler/debugger (e.g., SPIM MIPS assembler, simulator, and debugger).