Computer Architecture

The course aims at introducing basic concepts of hardware and firmware architectures of computing systems, starting from digital circuit fundamentals up to the description of behavior and structure of the main parts of a computing system and its programming in machine language.

Students are expected to master information encoding techniques, Boolean algebra, and key notions of logic circuits. They will have to demonstrate understanding of role and behavior of basic elements related to structure and functioning of a computer. Students will have also to be able to translate simple algorithms into the machine language of the reference processor adopted in the course.