Design of Computer Systems

Students are able to describe the functionality of the operation, memory and control units and their communication in a computer. They are familiar with VHDL.

Understanding of development trends and possibilities of computer technology.

To give the students knowledge of organization and functioning of a (single core) processor, in particular, the principles of the operation, memory and control units, the algorithms with fixed and floating point number systems, the subsystem communication level, and integration of the processor to a parallel system.

This course is essential to all engineers working in the areas of computer engineering and computer science as it explains how computers work and how they are built at the hardware level. Understanding the principles of, for example, arithmetic operations conducted in fixed point and floating point number representations, instruction execution in pipelines or memory hierarchy will allow the practitioners to develop better hardware and software. Writing high-quality code is impossible without understanding the computer organization principles.

Boolean algebra, basics of electrical circuits, basic computer elements, design of combinatorial and sequential circuits.

• Drábek, V: Computer organization. Lecture notes of Brno University of Technology, PC-DIR publ., Brno, 1995. (in Czech).
• Pinker, J., Poupa, M.: Číslicové systémy a jazyk VHDL, BEN - technická literatura, Praha, 2006. (in Czech).
• Hennessy, J. L., Patterson, D. A.: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 2nd edition, Morgan Kaufmann Publ., 1996, and new editions, e.g. the 5th ed. from 2012.
• Materials presented at course, available on the course website.

• Hamacher, C., Vranesic, Z., Zaky, S.,  N. Manjikian: Computer Organization and Embedded Systems, 6th edition, McGraw Hill Education, 2011, ISBN-13: 978-0073380650

• Introduction, processor and its function.
• Data representation.
• Instruction sets, register structures.
• Modelling in VHDL.
• Pipeline processing.
• Algorithms of fixed-point operations.
• Algorithms of floating point operations, iterative algorithms.
• Controllers.
• Memories, cache memory.
• Buses, peripheral interfacing and control.
• Computer performance and performance evaluation.
• Reliability of computer systems.
• Introduction to parallel architectures.

• VHDL - introduction
• VHDL - synthesizable code
• Introduction to FITkit
• Processor in VHDL
• Huffman code, Hamming code
• Modular arithmetic, adders
• Multipliers
• Division
• Iterative algorithms
• Performance evaluation, reliability
• Parallel Architectures

• Two projects will be assigned during the semester.

Written final exam, mid-term exam and submitting projects in due dates.

Within this course, attendance on the lectures and demonstrations is not monitored. The knowledge of students is examined by the projects, the mid-term exam and by the final exam. The minimal number of points which can be obtained from the final exam is 20. Otherwise, no points will be assigned to a student. In the case of a reported barrier preventing the student to perform the scheduled activity, the guarantor can allow the student to perform this activity on an alternative date.

For receiving the credit and thus for entering the exam, students have to get at least 20 points during the semester.

Plagiarism and not allowed cooperation will cause that involved students are not classified and disciplinary action can be initiated.