Study the architecture & organisation of modern processors, and influences upon these, with emphasis on pipelined RISC machines; gain understanding of the design of the memory subsystem, I/O, and system level interconnect; become proficient in the use of tools such as VHDL and SimpleScalar for the description, simulation, and verification of architectural designs; complete a series of assignments leading to the design, implementation, validation and assessment of a RISC system. It is assumed students are familiar with combinational and sequential logic design principles and have some experience in the use of CAD tools to describe and simulate digital systems.