Course Objectives - Learning Outcomes
Course Objectives:
This course aims to teach what a digital circuit is, which are the basic concepts and elements of digital design, and how all these can be used to build a major and central example of a digital circuit: a simple computer. Of course, the computer that we will build will be oversimplified (and thus extremely slow) but nevertheless it will be a computer.
Also, this course aims to familiarize the student with digital systems in the laboratory: the course includes weekly two-hour laboratory exercises using switches, LED's, breadboards, relays, TTL and CMOS chips, and a simple datapath of an accumulator-style processor using two separate memories (instructions, data) and lots of 7-segment displays to monitor its state, bus value, and ALU output; students build an elementary computer out of it, by implementing its control section on the breadboard.
Learning Objectives:
- Basic undestanding of what digital circuits are and how they operate
- Understanding of how a simple computer works
- Familiarization with digital circuits and computer hardware, in the laboratory
- Basic understanding of how a computer works