6.004 offers an introduction to the engineering of digital systems. Starting with MOS transistors, the course develops a series of building blocks — logic gates, combinational and sequential circuits, finite-state machines, computers and finally complete systems.
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Both hardware and software mechanisms are explored through a series of design examples.
6.004 is required material for any EECS undergraduate who wants to understand (and ultimately design) digital systems. A good grasp of the material is essential for later courses in digital design, computer architecture and systems. The problem sets and lab exercises are intended to give students “hands-on” experience in designing digital systems; each student completes a gate-level design for a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor during the semester.
Course Currilcum
- Course overview and mechanics, basics of information Unlimited
- Digital abstraction, combinational logic, voltage-based encoding Unlimited
- CMOS technology, gate design, timing Unlimited
- Canonical forms; synthesis, simplification Unlimited
- Sequential logic Unlimited
- Storage elements, finite state machines Unlimited
- Synchronization, metastability Unlimited
- Pipelining; throughput and latency Unlimited
- Case study: multipliers Unlimited
- Beta instruction set architecture, compilation Unlimited
- Machine language programming issues Unlimited
- Models of computation, programmable architectures Unlimited
- Stacks and procedures Unlimited
- Non-pipelined Beta implementation Unlimited
- Multilevel memories; locality, performance, caches Unlimited
- Cache design issues Unlimited
- Virtual memory: mapping, protection, contexts Unlimited
- Virtual machines: timesharing, OS kernels, supervisor calls Unlimited
- Devices and interrupt handlers, preemptive interrupts, real-time issues Unlimited
- Communication issues: busses, networks, protocols Unlimited
- Communicating processes: semaphores, synchronization, atomicity, deadlock Unlimited
- Pipelined Beta implementation, bypassing Unlimited
- Pipeline issues: delay slots, annulment, exceptions Unlimited
- Parallel processing, shared memory, cache coherence, consistency criteria Unlimited
- Wrapup lecture Unlimited
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