THE PROJECTS
7 deliverables.
Every one earns its keep.
Each chapter that ships a project teaches one concrete skill. Three difficulty tiers each — Normal, Medium, Hard — so you can take the work as far as you want. The capstone is the final.
P1 WEEKLY
Week 1 · Foundations
The SoC Teardown
"What does it mean to build well inside limits you did not choose?"
What makes mobile architecture a different discipline — battery, heat, size, always-on operation, radios and sensors; the system-on-chip and every block on it; AArch64 registers, instruction execution, and exception levels; reduced versus complex instruction sets; ARM against x86 and RISC-V; pipelining, superscalar and out-of-order execution, branch prediction; single-instruction-multiple-data with NEON, SVE2, and the RISC-V vector extension; and how to read a real Snapdragon, Apple, MediaTek, or Google block diagram→
P2 WEEKLY
Week 2 · CPU
The Placement Study
"Why does a body have many members, each with different work?"
Heterogeneous multicore as the defining idea of modern mobile computing: performance cores against efficiency cores, big.LITTLE and DynamIQ, homogeneous versus heterogeneous multiprocessing, thread migration and affinity, hardware and software scheduling, frequency and voltage scaling, single-thread against multicore performance, sustained against burst, cache coherence between unlike cores, and performance-per-watt as the metric that decides the design→
P3 WEEKLY
Week 3 · Memory
The Memory Wall Lab
"Why is the thing you keep close the thing you actually use?"
Why an algorithm with fewer instructions can still lose: registers and the L1/L2/L3 hierarchy, hits, misses, locality and replacement, shared versus private caches and coherence, LPDDR main memory, bandwidth against latency, unified and shared memory architectures, virtual memory, page tables and translation lookaside buffers, memory-mapped input/output and direct memory access, why moving data costs more energy than computing on it, memory pressure on a phone, and NAND and UFS storage→
P5 WEEKLY
Week 5 · Power
The Energy and Thermal Study
"Why is the race not to the swift?"
The week that reframes the whole course: dynamic against static power, the relationship among voltage, frequency and power, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, clock gating, power gating, sleep states, race-to-idle, performance-per-watt, battery characteristics and energy budgets, thermal design power against a mobile thermal envelope, throttling, sustained against peak performance, how an operating system responds to thermal stress, and energy-aware scheduling→
P6 WEEKLY
Week 6 · I/O & Radios
The Integration Map
"What joins many parts into one working body?"
Everything outside the compute blocks: SoC buses and interconnects, memory-mapped peripherals, interrupts, direct memory access revisited, USB and PCIe where they appear, display controllers, touch, cameras, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and satellite positioning, sensor hubs and always-on processors, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi architecture, the cellular modem as an SoC subsystem, fifth-generation cellular at the level an architect needs, the hardware and software boundary, hardware abstraction layers, and interrupt-driven against polled designs→
P7 WEEKLY
Week 7 · Security
The Silicon Threat Model
"If the foundation is unsound, what is the watchman worth?"
Hardware security from the root of trust upward: the threat model for a device that leaves the building, secure and verified boot, trusted execution environments, TrustZone and the secure and normal worlds, privilege and exception levels, memory protection, hardware-backed keys, biometrics and secure processors, cryptographic acceleration, memory tagging, side-channel attacks, Spectre- and Meltdown-class architectural vulnerabilities, physical against software attacks, secure enclaves and secure elements, and post-quantum cryptography as an emerging mobile workload→
P8 FINAL
Week 8 · Analysis
The Capstone SoC Investigation
"What makes a measurement honest?"
Benchmarking correctly and the architecture judgment it serves: microbenchmarks against application benchmarks, utilization against actual performance, instructions per cycle, cache-miss and branch-miss rates, memory bandwidth, GPU utilization, throttling, power measurement, profilers and hardware performance counters, ARM Performance Studio and the Android tooling, comparing real silicon, and where mobile systems are going — phones against tablets against headsets against wearables, edge artificial intelligence, RISC-V application processors, chiplets and advanced packaging, and ever more specialized accelerators→