Course materials
Fall 2024
01 · Syllabus
This course introduces computer organization and architecture through C programming, MIPS assembly, memory systems, and digital components. Students connect high-level code to machine instructions while studying processors, cache, I/O, functional units, buses, and interconnects.
There is no required textbook. Course notes, CLion and CMake support C programming; MIPS tools support assembly practice; and Logisim supports computer-component design activities.
The number of exercises depends on course progress. Each includes programming questions and must be submitted on time; late submissions are not accepted.
Assignments constitute 50% and quizzes and exams constitute 50% of the course grade. Standard letter-grade thresholds begin with A at 93, A− at 90, and B+ at 87.
The classroom must remain respectful and free of discrimination, bullying, and other harmful conduct. Violations are addressed through course and college procedures.
Six C programming assignments provide six fourth-hour sessions, five assembly assignments provide five sessions, and two Logisim projects provide four sessions. Together they account for fifteen structured hours outside regular class meetings.
AI can be a useful assistant when used reasonably, but it must not replace a student’s thinking. Assignments must be completed independently. Students should understand and be able to reproduce and explain all submitted work; significant inconsistencies may require an in-person demonstration and may be reported under academic-integrity procedures.
02 · Contents
CMake and CLion workflows, preprocessing, header files, compilation units, tokens, identifiers, constants, operators, and comments.
Integral and floating-point representations, IEEE 754, casting, constants, conditional statements, loops, and loop-control statements.
Pointer semantics and arithmetic, function declarations and calls, callbacks, variable arguments, storage duration, stack, heap, and global storage.
One- and multidimensional arrays, strings, enumerations, structures, unions, bit fields, and data layout.
Formatted and character I/O, file operations, command-line arguments, copying memory, dynamic allocation, and undefined behavior.
Locality, cache lines, direct-mapped, set-associative and fully associative caches, multilevel caches, replacement policies, write policies, and coherence.
RISC and CISC, datapaths, registers, the arithmetic logic unit, program counters, instruction formats, and the MIPS instruction-set architecture.
Data sections, arrays, load/store operations, direct and indirect memory access, system calls, arithmetic, and bitwise instructions.
Processor flags, conditional branches, loops, control-flow translation, loop unrolling, and low-level reasoning about C programs.
Parameter passing, return addresses, caller- and callee-saved registers, stack frames, subroutines, recursion, and heap allocation.
03 · Exam preparation
The student is expected to conduct himself, at all times, both on and off the campus, as a gentleman and a responsible citizen.
I will complete this exam in a fair, honest, respectful, responsible, and trustworthy manner. This means that I will complete the exam as if the professor was watching my every action. I will act according to the professor’s instructions, and I will neither give nor receive any aid or assistance other than what is authorized. I know that the integrity of this exam and this class is up to me, and I pledge not to take any action that would break the trust of my classmates or professor, or undermine the fairness of this class.
04 · Assignments
Open each assignment to work directly from the original C, assembly, cache, and computer-organization questions.
05 · Projects