This course should be useful for several types of students. Those who plan to specialize in designing computer hardware can use this course as a basis for more advanced study; those primarily interested in writing computer software can make better-informed decisions about software design; and those who just want to understand how a computer works can gain this understanding, along with an appreciation for ``the human story'' of how people have developed computers to their current state.
I assume, in all three cases, that students have had a year or two of programming experience in a high-level language and have done some programming in assembler language, preferably MIPS assembler language. In this semester we'll shift our focus down below assembler and even machine language, and learn how wires, transistors, and gates are combined in a computer to implement a machine language. We'll discuss how simple Boolean gates are combined to perform arithmetic and logical operations, how a processor carries out multi-step operations, and how pipelining and hierarchical memory work to enhance computer performance.