COMS 320: Computer Organization I

This course was taught during the 2002-03 academic year.  The curriculum has been revised to include assembly language programming so much of the information on this page no longer holds true.  If you are interested in the new version of the course, you should check the student bulletin or the new course webpages.  This website will no longer be updated.

Course description: Introduction to computer hardware and its design including Boolean logic, basic digital circuits, number representations and digital arithmetic, instruction set design, digital storage, performance metrics, processor datapath and control, pipelining, memory hierarchy, busses and I/O interfacing, parallel processors. This is a lecture-based course with no lab component.

Pre-requisites: A C grade or higher in COMS 212, MATH 180 or 121. Be prepared to show me that you have met the pre-requisites in the first two days of class A copy of your transcript is suitable evidence. I will return your transcript during the following class unless you need it for another class that day.

Professor: Rebecca Bates (bates@mnsu.edu)
Contact Information

Course Hours and Location

Office Hours

Course Materials
Required Text: Structured Computer Organization, 4th Ed., Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Prentice Hall, 1999.

Course Goals
This course will provide an understanding of the historical and current concepts and implementations of computer organization.  Students are not expected to become computer architects by taking this course, but should gain an adequate understanding of the concepts to improve their creation and use of applications.  Computer professionals need a good understanding of Computer Organization to assist in designing operating systems, writing compilers, programming databases, or performing other software tasks.
 

Course Objectives

1. Students will be able to identify levels and components of general computer architecture with specific knowledge of the example architectures presented in class. 
2. Students will be able to describe and discuss design trade-offs for various levels and components of computer architecture.
3. Students will be able to model and describe the functioning of computer architecture based on presented examples.  This includes such things as
   • expressing numbers in IEEE floating point standard
   • tracing inputs through arithmetic logic units
   • using microinstructions to control an example microprocessor.
4. Students will be able to extrapolate from simple architectures to a more generalized architecture.
5. Students will practice technical writing and research skills while expanding their knowledge about an aspect of the material in this course.

Other Information

Additional Resources

What do all the acronyms mean?

• www.webopedia.com: an online dictionary of computer and internet terminology.

Floating point numbers:

• Web calculator for converting to and from floating point hexidecimal numbers (from Queen's College, NY).  There are links from this page to more information about the IEEE-754 standard.
• A floating point tutorial by Kip R. Irvine.
• "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic," David Goldberg, Computing Surveys, March 1991.  An edited reprint is on the web for Sun documentation.

Developments in Logic:

• IBM and molecular computers.  Read the story here and see simulations of the domino-like motion of the molecules here.

More information on buses:

• Chapter 8 of Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, 2nd Ed., D. A. Patterson and J. L. Hennessy, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1998.

How semi-conductor devices work:

• Transistors, amplifiers, memory, CD ROMs.  This link from JAS at SUNY-Buffalo has animations and explanations of these and more.

How disks work:

• Useful animations from the Visualization Lab at IBM.

How do I correctly cite sources from the web in my term paper?

• IEEE reference format can be found in their Information for Authors.
• Check out the MLA faq response  on this.

Page last modified by R.A. Bates on 07/10/2003 04:32 PM.