Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
Objectives The student is expected to develop an understanding of a range of interfacing techniques, including disk I/O and interrupt-driven and DMA control, and the ability to design interfaces for a typical bus. The student is also expected to acquire an understanding of the methods of using parallelism in computer organisation and methods of improving reliability and some techniques for speeding arithmetic hardware.
Synopsis Microprocessor-based systems: CPU, memory, I/O. Interrupt structures, direct memory access (DMA), computer buses. Pipelining and RISC. Computer peripherals and interfacing: magnetic storage devices, CRT terminals. Reliability, fault tolerance and error detection. Hardware for fast integer and floating point operations.
Assessment Examination (2 hours): 70% + Laboratory work: 30%