The next installment in the courseware section — computer design — is now available.

This course shows how to design a computer starting with an abstract specification of the instruction set architecture (ISA) and ending with a gate-level implementation. The course teaches a method which successively translates a higher-level representation for the machine into a lower-level representation. For example, the ISA is translated to a datapath consisting of large-grain building blocks and a control graph annotated with register transfer statements. Then, the datapath and control graph are mapped into gate-level building blocks and control store. Different datapath and control styles (clocking, pipelining and microprogramming) are discussed. Computer science students should be comfortable with the representations — no scary electronics.

I taught this course for several years at Case Western Reserve University. It’s an undergraduate level course that assumes a prerequisite course in basic logic design. So, if you already know about gates, flip/flops and simple sequential logic, you’re ready to dive right in! Course material includes draft chapters for a book on computer design and slides.

I hope that you will be able to use this course for background knowledge once I begin to experiment with and write up Papillio projects. I would probably base class projects on Xilinx FPGAs (Papillio) if I were teaching this course today. Papillio makes hardware design personal and affordable. I would love to see more computer science students take up hardware design, especially in high school. Perhaps this course will help you out.