520.216 - Spring 2013 -

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Course Logistics

Time and Place

Lectures: Barton Hall 115, TuTh 3.00 p.m. - 4.15 p.m.

Teaching Assistant

Gaspar Tognetti, Barton 400, (410)-516-8361, gtognetti at gmail dot com

Office Hours: Monday 11-12

Grading

Quizzes (20%)
Laboratory assignments and mini projects (40%)
Final project and written report (40%)

Course Ethics

Homework and laboratory assignments: Developing the ability to work within a group is certainly one of the objectives for this course. However, homework assignments, pre-lab write-ups and examinations must be done on your own. Please read here what you are supposed to do alone and how much you are allowed to collaborate.

Course Website

www.ece.jhu.edu/~andreou/216

Study Guide and Textbooks

The course will be taught from notes, and original material (i.e. papers, many of them historical). The syllabus in this course is an adaptation of the MIT course 6.004 Computational Structures. Much of the material in the syllabus can be found in three books. The general topics on information, and computer architecture covered nicely in the Ward and Halstead book, Computation Structures. This book is available from Amazon or in electronic form "browse one page at a time" from Google books here. I recommend that you purchase this book. It is a classic and even though the first chapters on technology may be dated, it is still an excellent reference for the material we will be covering in this course. You can find used versions of the book for as little as $10 on Amazon.

The seminal book by Mead and Conway is a good introduction to VLSI. Today microelectronics have moved beyond the 6um NMOS technology but the key ideas in there are as relevant today as they were 30 years ago. Drafts of the book in electronic form can be found on Lynn Conway's website here; (the last draft V3 iis pretty much what you have in the published book). A comprehensive student's guide to the digital world with a summary of the key topics and concepts that we will cover this semester is here. [Courtesy of Margaret Jane Wong (née Chong) at MIT (local pdf copy). ]

A good reference on modern CMOS design with emphasis on practical issues and physical layout is the Sicard/Delmas-Bendhia book.

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