Calendar

Each of the quizzes took place in recitation one day after the listed lecture.

Abbreviations

CMOS = complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor
ALU = arithmetic logic unit
OS = operating system

LEC # TOPICS LABS QUIZZES
1 Course overview and mechanics, basics of information    
2 Digital abstraction, combinational logic, voltage-based encoding    
3 CMOS technology, gate design, timing    
4 Canonical forms; synthesis, simplification    
5 Sequential logic Lab 1 (CMOS) due Quiz 1
6 Storage elements, finite state machines    
7 Synchronization, metastability Lab 2 (Adder) due  
8 Pipelining; throughput and latency    
9 Case study: multipliers Lab 3 (ALU) due  
10 Beta instruction set architecture, compilation   Quiz 2
11 Machine language programming issues    
12 Models of computation, programmable architectures Lab 4 (Turing machine) due  
13 Stacks and procedures    
14 Non-pipelined Beta implementation Lab 5 (Assembly language) due  
15 Multilevel memories; locality, performance, caches    
16 Cache design issues   Quiz 3
17 Virtual memory: mapping, protection, contexts    
18 Virtual machines: timesharing, OS kernels, supervisor calls Lab 6 (Beta) due  
19 Devices and interrupt handlers, preemptive interrupts, real-time issues    
20 Communication issues: busses, networks, protocols Lab 7 (Trap handler) due Quiz 4
21 Communicating processes: semaphores, synchronization, atomicity, deadlock    
22 Pipelined Beta implementation, bypassing    
23 Pipeline issues: delay slots, annulment, exceptions Lab 8 (Tiny OS) due Quiz 5
24 Parallel processing, shared memory, cache coherence, consistency criteria    
25 Wrapup lecture Project due