Computer Engineering

The course is designed to introduce students to the field of computer engineering. It starts from the basic foundations of computer engineering and equip students and key concepts and ideas used in the computer engineering field. Thus, the course covers three main areas of computer engineering:

• System software

• Hardware

• Design tools

The main topics covered by this course are:

• Number representation: - This topic covers various schemes of number representation of a computer system such as, Signed Numbers, Redundant Number Systems, Residue Number Systems and encoding schemes used in Embedded Systems.

• Basic computer arithmetic: - This topic covers the basic binary arithmetic operations such as binary addition, counter, basic multiplication and division schemes, floating point representation and operation.

• Microarchitecture and computer architecture using RISC-V: - This topic covers the basics of microarchitecture and architecture design starting from basic logic gates, combinational and sequential circuits, storage elements, data-path computer organization of von-Neumann system such as processing unit, control unit, storage and registers, instruction format and instruction set architecture.

• System architecture: - In this topic the following concepts are covered: Assembly code and its role in the RISC-V architecture, extended program architecture and memory management.

• Parallel computing systems: - This topic introduces various parallelization and architectural level acceleration such as SIMD, multi and many core systems, GPU, TPU architectures.

• System modeling and management: - This topic covers basics on system software and operating system, virtualization, performance modeling and evaluation.

• Tools and methods for computer system design: - This topic covers concepts on compilation and interpretation, design automation methods and computer aided synthesis and optimization, hardware modeling and high-level synthesis.