ECE243 — Computer Organization

Course focused on computer organisation and embedded systems. Laboratory work is in Nios II. Preceded by ECE241 — Digital Systems.

Why Nios II over ARM? Prof Rose says it’s because 1) there’s a small chance we’ll be programming in straight ARM assembly in our careers and 2) the concept of interrupts isn’t needlessly complicated in Nios. He also mentioned a future iteration of the course would use RISC-V, since the DE1-SoC can load it in as a “soft processor”.

For the processor design portion of the course, Logic and Computer Design Fundamentals (Mano/Kime) is a great resource. For the portion on embedded systems, Assembly language, and cache memory, Computer Organization and Embedded Systems (Hamacher, Vranesic, Zaky, Manjikian) is a good book.

Concepts covered

• DE1-SoC
• Assembly and general programming concepts
  • Conditional statement
  • Loops
  • Function (subroutine, return register)
  • Bitwise operator
  • Data type and struct
• Processor constructs
  • Buffer
  • Parallel port (PIT)
  • GPIO
  • Polling
  • Interrupt
• Processor design
  • Register
    • Register file
    • Program counter
    • Condition code registers (Z/N)
    • Instruction register
  • Arithmetic logic unit
  • Finite state machine
    • Datapath
    • Control path
  • Decoder
• Instruction set architecture
  • Endianness
  • Load-store architecture
  • Instruction encoding
• Memory
  • Stack
  • Buffer overflow
  • FIFO
  • Cache memory
    • Locality
    • Cache mapping (direct, associative)
    • Replacement algorithm (LRU)
• Building executable code
  • Compiler
  • Object file
  • Linker
  • Machine code
• C for embedded applications (volatile keyword)
• Audio
  • Audio card
  • Digital-to-analogue converter
  • Analogue-to-digital converter
• Computer graphics
  • VGA
  • Frame buffer

Quick links

• Lecture and laboratory schedule
• Course notes by Prof Moshovos
• CPUlator for the DE1-SoC with Nios II