Musings, Courses, & Projects by Rob Marano

ECE 251 Spring 2025 Weekly Course Notes

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Week(s)	Dates	Topic
1, 2	1/21, 1/28	Hardware Modeling with Software (Verilog HDL) HDL
3	2/4	Wrap-up Verilog; Computer Abstraction & Stored Program Concept
4, 5	2/11, 2/18	Instructions —The Language & Grammar of Computers
6, 7	2/25, 3/4	Intro to Assembly Language Programming — MIPS CPU
8	3/11	Midterm Exam
9,	3/18	Arithmetic for Computers
10, 11, 12	3/25, 4/1, 4/22	The Processor — Data Path & Control
13, 14	4/29, 5/6	Interrupts; Memory Hierarchies (Caching)
15	5/13	Final Exam
15	5/16	Group Final Project due no later than 5pm ET this day

Follow the link above to the respective week’s materials below.

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Week 1 — Jan 21 — Hardware Modeling with Verilog HDL — Part 1

Topics

1. Intro to logic design using Verilog HDL
2. Logic elements
3. Expressions
4. Modules and ports

Topic Deep Dive

See notes_week_01

Software Installation

• Verilog
  • Follow instructions here
• Build files
  
  • Unix (MacOS, Linux)
    • Makefile
  • Windows
    • makefile.ps1

Homework Assignment

See hw-01; solution

Week 2 — 1/28 — Hardware Modeling — Part 2

Topics

1. Built-in primitives
2. User-defined primitives
3. Dataflow modeling

Topic Deep Dive

See notes_week_02

Homework Assignment

See hw-02.md; solution

Week 3 — 2/4 — Verilog; Computer Abstraction & Stored Program Concept

Topics

1. Verilog: Parameterization; Built-in primitives; User-defined primitives; Dataflow modeling
2. Stored Program Concept
3. History of computer architecture and modern advancements

Topic Deep Dive

See notes_week_03

Reading Assignment

• Read sections Chap 2.1-2.7 in the textbook handout for chapter 2, along with my summary notes handout Prof’s Notes on Comp Arch

Week 4 — 2/11 — Instructions —The Language & Grammar of Computers — Part 1

Topics

1. Recap: Stored Program Concept, and the history of computer architecture and modern advancements
2. The alphabet, vocabulary, grammar of computers
   1. 1s and 0s as the alphabet
   2. compute and memory instructions as the vocabulary
   3. implementation of compute and memory instructions as the grammar
3. Introducing the instructions of a computer delivered by the architecture
   1. Operations of the computer hardware
   2. Operands of the computer hardware
   3. Signed and unsigned numbers
   4. Representing instructions in the computer
   5. Logical operations

Topic Deep Dive

See notes_week_04

Reading Assignment

• Read sections Chap 2.1-2.7 in my notes handout Prof’s Notes on Comp Arch, and these notes follow exactly from the MIPS textbook’s Chapter 2 and its 22 sections. I suggest reading the textbook sections too.
• Follow along with our textbook’s Chapter 2 slide deck

Week 5 — 2/18 — Instructions —The Language & Grammar of Computers — Part 2

Topics

1. Instructions for making decisions
2. Supporting procedures (aka functions) in computer hardware
3. Begin converting our instructions to control logic for computation and memory storage.

Topic Deep Dive

See notes_week_05

Software Installation

• Install the MIPS emulator SPIM on your computer, either the SPIM GUI called “QtSPIM” or the CLI program spim. Here is the installation for the GUI program and for the CLI program

Reading Assignment

• Read Prof’s CPU Design Guide
• Read sections Chap 2.7 through Chap 2.10 in my notes handout Prof’s Notes on Comp Arch, and these notes follow exactly from the MIPS textbook’s Chapter 2 and its 22 sections. I suggest reading the textbook sections too.
• Read Chapters 3 and 4 in Introduction to MIPS Assembly Language Programming
• Continue to follow along with our textbook’s Chapter 2 slide deck

NOTE: Check our shared Teams drive for these files too as well as the installation for our software.

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