This course aims to study the hardware operation of digital electronic architectures for computing and information processing. It presents the components that are systematically present in digital architectures: control, data path and memory. The first part of the course will analyze the internal architecture of processors and the way in which they execute software instructions. The second part will focus on how (through the organization of the components) it is possible to improve the performance of the processor.
Architectural principles: von Neumann and (modified) Harvard, RISC, CISC Datapath design, control and instruction flow Instruction sets, memory, addressing types Computing machine benchmarking. Performance acceleration techniques: Pipeline, Cache memory