Art: Integrated Course

Credits: 6 CP

Prüfer / Betreuer

Time

  • Wednesday 13:30 - 15:10 (S101/A03), mostly board exercises
  • Thursday 16:15 - 17:55 (S105/122), mostly lectures
  • Planned: Live-Stream of lectures and board exercises on lect.stream.

Start of Course

The first lecture starts on Thursday, 16 Oct 2025!

This integrated course deals with advanced topics in computer architecture and the concrete implementation of microarchitectures in digital application-specific circuits (ASICs).

Topics

Topics covered include, for example:

  • Privileged operations
  • Bus interfaces
  • Caches
  • Memory management units
  • Memory interfaces
  • Instruction-level parallelism
  • Branch prediction
  • Speculative and out-of-order execution
  • Steps and software tools for ASIC design
  • Hardware description in SystemVerilog and Bluespec

Lecture Study Materials

Since not all topics can be covered in depth during the lectures and board exercises, independent further study of the relevant textbooks is expected.

We are planning to use the following textbooks:

  • Harris, Stine, Thompson, Harris; RISC-V System Design; Elsevier 2025
    (this will be the main textbook)
  • Hennessy, Patterson, Kozyrakis; Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 6th or 7th Edition; Morgan Kaufmann
    (this will become relevant in the last third of the course)

The main textbook is very new. If it is not actually available in time for the course, the authors have kindly permitted us to make preview versions avilable to course participants as hardcopies. We estimate the price for these preview versions with ca. 850 pages to be around EUR 60. Passing the exam with just the material on the slides will be extremely difficult. We thus expect participants to have the preview version of the textbook readily available for study. To this end, we will pass around order forms (with a binding obligation to pay) in the second week of lectures, and expect to have the hardcopies available for distribution the week after.

The second textbook, needed in the second half of the course, is already well established. The 6th edition should easily be available in the library, while the 7th edition has been announced, but is most likely not available at the beginning of the course (it has been postponed numerous times already). But the 6th edition is quite sufficient to follow the course presentations.

Practical Topics in the Board Exercise Time Slots

The practical sessions in the board exercise time slots will teach the hands-on use of open-source RISC-V programming tools and ASIC design tools such as OpenLane/LibreLane. In addition, the modern hardware description language Bluespec, also available in open-source form, will be introduced.

Instruction language

The language of instruction in the course will be adapted to the needs of the participants. Upon request, the course will be held in English; otherwise, it will be conducted in German. The teaching materials (e.g., lecture slides, exercises, and the exam) are only available in English.

This is an elective advanced course. To participate, you will need to have well-founded competencies, as acquired in fundamental lectures such as Digitaltechnik / Logischer Entwurf and Rechnerorganisation / Rechnersysteme I. These courses encompass the contents of the textbook Digital Design and Computer Architecture, RISC-V Edition by Harris/Harris, including practical experience with using the SystemVerilog hardware description language.

Recording Features and File Formats

Indexed Recordings

We provide an option to access the MP4 course recordings with indexing, allowing you to jump directly to a slide within the video. To use this feature, download both the MP4 file and the corresponding HTML file (both files must be downloaded into the same directory!). Then open the HTML file in a modern web browser. The browser will act as a video player and display a timeline with the slides on the right-hand side, which can be clicked to navigate directly.

High-Quality Vector Recordings

We are continuing this year to provide recordings not only in the usual H.264-compressed video .mp4 files but also in a second dedicated format, called .plr. This vector-based format offers several advantages over .mp4 video files:

  • The recordings consist of freely scalable vectors and therefore offer significantly higher quality at larger display sizes compared to pixel-based H.264 videos.
  • The vector files are automatically indexed per slide. This means you can jump directly to the lecture section corresponding to a particular slide, and you can also search the recording by slide keywords.
  • The .plr files are usually much smaller than the .mp4 video files.

This functionality is enabled by a dedicated player which should run in any modern browser. The player is included in the .zip archive of the vector recordings and runs as JavaScript (.js). After extracting the .zip archive, simply double-click on the index.html file and select the .plr recording you want to play.

We welcome feedback, bug reports, and suggestions for improvement in the CAI Moodle forum!

Recordings

Slides and other Course Materials