Purpose
This area is split between four tracks. Digital design covers logic, state, timing, and HDL workflow. Signal conditioning covers the analog side. Computer architecture covers the ISA-to-microarchitecture-to-RTL stack that sits on top of digital design. GPU architecture applies the same digital design primitives to a real, large-scale parallel processor.
The split is useful because the constraints are different. Digital design is mostly about discrete state, timing closure, and implementation. Signal conditioning is about how physical signals get shaped before a digital system can trust them. Computer architecture is about the abstractions (ISA, pipeline, out-of-order execution) that let digital design build something a compiler can target. GPU architecture is about what happens when you replicate and specialize that same digital logic at massive scale to extract data parallelism.
Sections
- Digital design: combinational logic, sequential logic, static timing analysis
- Signal conditioning: lecture 1, lecture 2, lecture 3
- Computer architecture: map, ISA/datapath/control, pipelining and hazards, out-of-order execution, SIMD to SIMT, RTL reading lab, experiments and benchmarking
- GPU architecture: GPU Architecture from First Principles, building SIMT execution up from clocked RTL primitives