Massey University

School of Engineering and Advanced Technology

159.233 Computer Architecture
(2009)

Course Controller: Paul Lyons
Other staff involved: Giovanni Moretti

LECTURE TIMES  Tuesday 2pm  Science Tower D 1.03
  Wednesday 11am AH 2.37
  Thursday 1pm Vet 1
TUTORIAL Friday 11am Science Tower D 1.03 (Starts Week 2)

There are 9 sections to the Architecture part of the course, and 9 weeks allocated. You should expect, therefore, to cover about 1 section each week.

There are 6 sections to the Assembly Language section of the course, and 3 weeks allocated. You should expect, therefore, to cover about 2 sections each week.

FAQs
Administrative information
Processor design notes
Assembler notes
Tutorials
Assignments
Sample Solutions for Assembler Assignment
Exams

 Administrative information:

Course Outline 

A comment about the purpose of providing lecture notes on this website  

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Architecture Section
Notes in PDF format

These are for internal students, and have deliberately been prepared with gaps for you to fill in during lectures.

Recorded notes for extramural students

Section 1 Intro and IC Fab
Section 2 The ISA
Section 3 HLL Constructs and Performance
Section 4 Arithmetic and the Datapath
Section 5 Floating Point Numbers
Section 6 ASMs
Section 7 Single Cycle Architecture
Section 8 Multicycle Architecture and Pipelining
Section 9 Memory Management
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Assembly Language Section
Assembler Section - Home Page

Study Programme for Assembler Section   
Lecture Slides and Explanatory notes
8051 Architecture and Instruction Set Reference Material
Development Tools - Assembler and Simulator
Using the Assembler & Simulator - an Online Demonstration
Sample Programs including old Assignments
FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions (on Assembler)
Topic List for Assembler Section
 
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Tutorials
Each week, the tutor will work through the answers to a couple of questions on that week's tutorial sheet, and will announce the questions that will be covered at the next week's tutorial. 

During the week, you should go through all the questions in the upcoming tutorial, and compare your answers to the specified questions with the tutor's answers. After the tutor has covered the set questions, you may also ask about any difficulties you had with the other questions on the sheet. 
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Assignments
Assignment 1: Worth 20%  
Assignment 2 : Worth 20%		 Assignment hints
Previous years' assignments  
(mostly with sample solutions)
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Exams
"Skeleton Exam"
This is basically a copy of this year's exam, with all the headers, questions number, marks and so on, exactly as they'll appear in the real exam, but with most of the text of the questions removed.

Date: 

Time: 

Place:

Bring a 23B pencil and an eraser

 

 Previous years' exams
2008
2007 354 exam

The curriculum has changed since the 253 exams below were set. Questions about Algorithmic State Machines and Assembly language remain relevant, but the material about architectures has been superceded and data communications is no longer in the curriculum. 2007's 354 exam (link above) has questions about that material, and the 253 exams below also have some relevant questions.
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1997
A comment about "model answers"
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*If you don't have a pdf (portable document format) reader installed on your computer, you'll need to download the free Acrobat reader to read or print these files