Computer Organization and Architecture

This NPTEL course from IIT Madras pairs computer organization with hands-on design. Its opening lectures cover high-speed circuit design, including fast adders and fast multipliers, before moving to instruction set architecture and floating-point arithmetic.

Circuits and assembly side by side

Alongside the theory, the course runs lab sessions on x86 programming, covering addressing modes and segmentation. Seeing how an adder is built in hardware and then how a program addresses memory in assembly makes the architecture material feel less like a list of terms.

Who it suits

• Students who want to understand arithmetic units at the circuit level, not only in a textbook diagram.
• Learners who expect to write or read assembly and need a grounding in addressing modes.
• Anyone who finds floating-point precision and accuracy hard to picture and wants worked examples.