When you first learn about digital logic, it probably seems like it is easy. You learn about AND and OR gates and figure that’s not very hard. However, going from a few basic gates to something like a ...

In my previous article, Understanding the Microprocessor, I gave a high-level overview of what a microprocessor is and how it functions. I talked about the kinds of tasks it performs and the different ...

If you’ve been reading Ars for any length of time, then you know that there are two terms that always come up in any of my articles: pipelining and superscalar execution. These two fundamental ...

Most computer architectures today are able to execute a few instructions in parallel on a single core by having multiple control and arithmetic-logic units. The order of execution may be scheduled by ...

For more on this topic see Using task parallelism in multicore LabView. In today's world of multicore processors and multithreaded applications, programmers need to think constantly about how to best ...

SoCs are optimized at the earliest stage possible in the design flow to avoid over-designing. Synthesis, being the first step for netlist generation, focuses on providing restructuring to accrue ...