Art: Integrated Course

Credits: 9 CP

Prüfer / Betreuer

Time

  • Wednesday 13:30 - 15:10 (S101/A03), lecture
  • Thursday 16:15 - 17:55 (S105/122), lecture
  • Bi-weekly Tuesday 14:20 - 16:00 (S410/1), board exercises
  • Planned: Live-Stream of lectures and board exercises on lect.stream.

Start of Course

The first lecture starts on Wednesday, 14 Oct 2026!

The first board exercise starts on Tuesday, 20 Oct 2026.

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
  • Hardware support for synchronization in parallel programming
  • 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-on-Chip Design; Elsevier 2026
    (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 material of the first textbook forms the backbone of the course, most lectures will use it directly either as slides or in your own self-study reading. The University library has a number of copies available for lending. If you decide to use the electronic version of the book, be sure to use the PDF format, as the EPUB format still has many typesetting errors.

The second textbook, needed in the last third of the course, is already well established. The 6th edition should easily be available in the library, while the 7th edition has just been published. But the 6th edition is quite sufficient to follow the course discussions.

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. By the end of the semester, students will have implemented a RISC-V core from RTL down to an ASIC design.

Note that the content of the board exercises and labs will be part of the exams. Attempting the exams without having actively participated in the board exercises and labs will be a very risky endeavor!

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.

CAI is an elective advanced course. To participate, you must 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 embedded in an .html file. 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 .html 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 .html file of the vector recordings and runs as JavaScript.

You can find the vector recording in the sub-folder ending with v in the recording folder. E.g., in CAI-20251016v.

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

Recordings

Slides and other Course Materials