TCAL members teach across the computer engineering curriculum, connecting foundational concepts in digital systems and programming with computer architecture and design, VLSI, and hands-on architectural experimentation.
The lab’s advanced courses form part of the K4 direction of the CEID curriculum, spanning computer architecture, hardware engineering, VLSI, and digital-system design.
Introduces the computer as a hierarchical system, covering data representation and arithmetic, processor and memory organization, instruction execution and addressing, assembly language, buses, and input/output.
Haridimos VergosBuilds a quantitative understanding of computer architecture through RISC-V, including ISA and assembly, performance evaluation, computer arithmetic, single-cycle datapath and control, introductory pipelining, and cache memories.
George PapadimitriouDevelops practical measurement and circuit-analysis skills using multimeters, generators, and oscilloscopes, with experiments on Kirchhoff and Thevenin equivalents, RC circuits, diodes, transistors, operational amplifiers, timing circuits, digital ICs, and flip-flops.
Konstantinos GeorgopoulosConnects computer architecture with parallel systems and programming by examining how instruction-level and thread-level parallelism, SIMD/vectorization, memory hierarchies, and multicore coherence shape program performance, then applying these concepts through processes, threads, OpenMP, and compiler optimizations.
George Papadimitriou
Vaios Papaioannou
Studies dependable and fault-tolerant system design, from faults, errors, failures, and fault models to reliability-related attributes and redundancy in hardware, information, time, and software.
Haridimos VergosIntroduces MOS transistors and CMOS VLSI design across electrical, logical, and physical levels, including fabrication and design rules, timing and power, transistor sizing, logic styles, and Cadence-based circuit simulation.
Konstantinos GeorgopoulosBuilds hands-on skills in designing and verifying combinational and sequential circuits using integrated circuits and VHDL, from structural and behavioral descriptions to testbenches, simulation, registers, counters, and ALU-based systems.
Marilena DounaviCovers Boolean algebra, canonical forms and logic minimization, the design of combinational and sequential circuits, and the construction of digital building blocks such as arithmetic circuits, multiplexers, decoders, registers, counters, and finite-state machines.
Konstantinos GeorgopoulosExplores digital-system testing and design for testability, covering physical defects and fault models, fault simulation and test generation, scan paths, BIST, boundary scan, memory testing, and industry tools.
Panagiotis SismanoglouDevelops computer-aided system design across HDLs and finite-state machines, hierarchical methods, logic and timing verification, rapid prototyping, and implementation flows for PCBs, programmable logic, FPGAs, and VLSI.
Haridimos VergosSurveys the complete design flow for digital and embedded systems, from VHDL modeling and synthesis to datapaths, control, memories, buses, error detection and correction, ASICs, FPGAs, packaging, and test.
Konstantinos GeorgopoulosApplies RISC-V architecture through programming and experimentation with RARS and Ripes, including assembly debugging, procedures, stack and heap, exceptions, pipeline visualization, data dependencies, and performance-aware instruction scheduling.
George Papadimitriou
Vaios Papaioannou
Christos Papadimitropoulos
Examines modern processor performance through RISC-V pipelines, hazards and branch prediction, out-of-order and superscalar execution, Tomasulo scheduling, prefetching, cache and virtual-memory behavior, and hands-on architectural modeling.
George PapadimitriouThese tools help students move from writing an instruction or an HDL description to observing pipelines, simulating hardware, and designing reproducible experiments in computer architecture and digital systems.
A lightweight RISC-V assembler and runtime simulator for writing, executing, and debugging assembly programs while observing how instructions map to machine code.
A visual processor simulator and assembly editor that exposes datapaths, pipeline stages, hazards, forwarding, caches, and instruction execution cycle by cycle.
A modular computer-system simulator for modeling processors and memory systems, designing controlled experiments, and evaluating architectural trade-offs with research-level methodology.
The compiler, assembler, linker, and supporting tools used to build RISC-V programs for experiments in gem5 and other simulation environments.
An integrated development environment for AMD FPGAs and adaptive SoCs, supporting VHDL design entry, simulation, synthesis, implementation, timing analysis, hardware debugging, and bitstream generation.
Students interested in computer architecture and digital systems can continue through a diploma thesis, research project, or collaboration with a TCAL member.