Class Meetings

All my sections meet on Mondays and Wednesdays.

• Section 10MDA meets from 10:30 to 11:45 am in SB B-141.
• Section 1MA3 meets from 1:30 to 2:45 in am SB B-141.
• Section E6MBA meets from 6:30 to 7:45 pm in SB D-133.

You must attend only the section for which you are actually registered. There are several reasons for this:

• The sections will proceed at their own pace. I plan to cover the same material in all my sections, but different sections will inevitably get out of sync, so attending the wrong section will cause you to miss material.
• There is not enough room in the classroom to provide seats for more than the actual number of students registered.
• During the first five weeks, I will be taking attendance to comply with university regulations. If you attend the wrong section, you won't get counted present.

Office Hours

Most office hour business can be handled by email. My address is vickery@qc.edu. Be sure to include "CS-343" in the subject line of every message you send me, and be sure to include your name in the body of each message.

If you want to see me in person, I will be available in my office, Science Building room A-222, for half an hour after each class. If those times are not convenient for you, you may make an appointment to meet with me at another time.

Textbooks

There is one textbook for the course:

Murdocca, Miles J. and Heuring, Vincent P.
Principles of Computer Architecture
Prentice Hall, 2000
ISBN 0-201-43664-7

We will be covering material from Appendix A and chapters 7, 8, and 10. Reading assignments are on the Course Schedule web page.

Other Material

You will be using two or three pieces of free software for this course; you will need a PC to run them.

• CircuitMaker You may have used this software to draw and simulate logic circuits in CS-240. If not, you will need to download and learn to use it from the web page listed here. Runs on Windows only.
• ARC Simulator This is a Java program that simulates the operation of the ARC processor developed in Chapter 6 of the textbook. You will need to have Java installed on your computer to use the simulator. Runs on any system with Java installed.
• WEB Pack Xilinx Inc. provides a free set of software tools for designing, simulating, and programming FPGAs. But the software is quite large (~60 MB) and complex to learn, so I'm not sure we will be able to include it in the course this semester. I can burn the software onto a CD if you want to use it and don't have the bandwidth to download it directly from Xilinx.

Homework, Quizzes, and Exams

• There will be several homework assignments, but they will count only 1% of your course grade. That is, if there are ten homework assignments, each one will count 0.1% of your course average. Submitting an assignment on time gives you full credit for it, no matter whether your answers are correct or not.

  You must submit your own homework solutions, but you are free to work on the homework assignments with anyone you wish. The idea is to use the homework as a way to reinforce the material in the course, not as a test of your knowledge. I will record whether or not you hand in homeworks by the assigned due dates, but I will not evaluate your homework in any way. Instead, I will send the solutions to you by email after the assignment due date.

  I encourage you to use the "Discussion Board" facility at QC Online to ask questions about the homework assignments. I also encourage you to answer other people's questions there: helping others is a great way to study the material.

• There will be two midterm exams and a final exam. Each exam will count 33.3% of your course average. Each exam will cover approximately 1/3 of the course (see the Course Schedule web page for dates). The final exam will not be cumulative unless I announce otherwise beforehand.

  If your lowest exam score is ten points or more below your middle exam score, its weight will be reduced by 10% and the weights of the other two exams will be increased by 5% each.

Discussion Board

The Blackboard system at online.qc.edu, which you used to access this web page, provides a Discussion Board that I encourage you to use to discuss issues related to this course. Feel free to post questions about the homework assignments there, for example. But if you offer help on the homework, help the requestor figure out how to answer the problem; don't just give the answer.