Introduces students to the organization and architecture of computer systems, beginning with the standard von Neumann model and then moving forward to more recent architectural concepts.

Digital logic: Fundamental building blocks (logic gates, flip-flops, counters, registers, PLA); logic expressions, minimization, sum of product forms; register transfer notation; physical considerations (gate delays, fan-in, fan-out).

Data representation: Bits, bytes, and words; numeric data representation and number bases; fixed- and floating-point systems; signed and twos-complement representations; representation of nonnumeric data (character codes, graphical data); representation of records and arrays.

Assembly level organization: Basic organization of the von Neumann machine; control unit; instruction fetch, decode, and execution; instruction sets and types (data manipulation, control, I/O); assembly/machine language programming; instruction formats; addressing modes; subroutine call and return mechanisms; I/O and interrupts.

Memory systems: Storage systems and their technology; coding, data compression, and data integrity; memory hierarchy; main memory organization and operations; latency, cycle time, bandwidth, and interleaving; cache memories (address mapping, block size, replacement and store policy); virtual memory (page table, TLB); fault handling and reliability.

Interfacing and communication: I/O fundamentals: handshaking, buffering, programmed I/O, interrupt-driven I/O; interrupt structures: vectored and prioritized, interrupt acknowledgment; external storage, physical organization, and drives; buses: bus protocols, arbitration, direct-memory access (DMA); introduction to networks; multimedia support; raid architectures.

Functional organization: Implementation of simple datapaths; control unit: hardwired realization vs. microprogrammed realization; instruction pipelining; introduction to instruction-level parallelism (ILP).

Multiprocessor and alternative architectures: Introduction to SIMD, MIMD, VLIW, EPIC; systolic architecture; interconnection networks; shared memory systems; cache coherence; memory models and memory consistency.

Performance enhancements: RISC architecture; branch prediction; prefetching; scalability.

Contemporary architectures: Hand-held devices; embedded systems; trends in processor architecture.