The class 6.004 at MIT basically steps through these abstractions one week/lab at a time. This was my favorite class in school. Each lab is a higher level of abstraction and eventually you've built a basic processor. It gives you a very clear picture of how "1s and 0s" can turn out to become what you see on your computer screen.
We had a class like this at my school (LTH in Sweden) and it was probably the most enlightening school experience I've had.
We started the first week with a handful of diodes and resistors building latches, and slowly built an adder, memory, a calculator and by the end eventually ended up with a programmable traffic light computer.
They were also phasing in FPGAs in the education so you could pick between breadboarding everything or doing it in software with an FPGA or even a mix. Very very fun.
Comments
The class 6.004 at MIT basically steps through these abstractions one week/lab at a time. This was my favorite class in school. Each lab is a higher level of abstraction and eventually you've built a basic processor. It gives you a very clear picture of how "1s and 0s" can turn out to become what you see on your computer screen.
OCW Link: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
We had a class like this at my school (LTH in Sweden) and it was probably the most enlightening school experience I've had.
We started the first week with a handful of diodes and resistors building latches, and slowly built an adder, memory, a calculator and by the end eventually ended up with a programmable traffic light computer.
They were also phasing in FPGAs in the education so you could pick between breadboarding everything or doing it in software with an FPGA or even a mix. Very very fun.
Too bad there are no videos
I couldn't find Lecture #1 on the other link, but I found this YouTube playlist of the same course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsJa1-ONUA8d6k-wherN4...
http://video.mit.edu/search/?q=6.004+Computation+Structures
Thanks