Computation Structures

How digital systems are layered

This course explains the architecture of digital systems by focusing on structural principles that apply across many technologies. It shows how a design moves through layers of implementation, with each level built from the primitives beneath it.

Ideas you follow

• Defining new primitives such as gates, instructions and procedures
• Analyzing potential concurrency, precedence constraints and performance
• Pipelined and multidimensional systems
• Instruction set design and architectural support for modern software structures

Who it suits

Students of hardware and computer architecture who want to see how software structures map onto physical machinery will find the course's focus on principles worthwhile. The layering idea, where each level is built from the primitives beneath it, is the thread that ties the individual topics together.