Technology, Marketing and Document Management Software: Electronic Circuit Design Years

2/27/2013

Electronic Circuit Design Years

English: Arithmatic Logic Unit schematic symbol Deutsch: Schema der artihmetisch-logischen Einheit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the subjects I enjoyed the most while I was at the University of Málaga studying software engineering was electronic circuit design.
It's very seldom that subjects catch your attention, but the fact that you can actually build a microprocessor during a 4 months class, including ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit), and the GPU or the different records.
I remember we had a book (Hennessy Patterson) which described very well the MIPS architecture, which was RISC (Intel's architecture was, and still is I think, CISC).

The other of the related subjects had to do with intensive work on Cache and its different types. This were also part of electronic circuits, but more for the computer architecture perspective. Among these, we studied the associative cache, random access cache and a mix of the previous ones.

It's very satisfying for me that I now live so close to hardware giants such as Intel and Apple. Or even Motorola, who made it big also for chips manufacturing.
Apple with their own architecture until they made the switch to Intel, not so long ago. I believe this was a great breakthrough still in the Steven Jobs years, since it made Apple concentrate on building an astonishing product, with actually a better operating system than Windows.