[Ownaginatios]

This course is available to only students enrolled in software engineering, and has a sort of parallel course with the same course code for computer and electrical engineers.

This course starts off with teaching the basics of Boolean algebra, gradually moving onto K-Maps, memory devices (i.e. flip-flops and registers), and then into finite state machines. There is also a component at the end on computer processor architecture with a final bonus project (worth ~5%), but that's optional.

The break down is 5 assignments worth 10% collectively, 5 labs worth 10% collectively (with possible bonus marks), a 30% midterm and a 50% final. There is also the aforementioned bonus project worth around 5% if you so choose to do it. The exam at the end wasn't too difficult if you studied, but it was definitely a lot of work (most of the class was working up to the very last second).

The labs are all done using a piece of software called Quartus in a programming language called 'Verilog', which maps code to a provided board for logic circuit simulation. It's a bit tedious at first to learn, but in the end, it's not that bad. The only real complaints I had with the labs were with the prelabs, which were usually ridiculously long (sometimes actually encompassing the whole lab itself). It was still doable though.

Overall, I actually really liked this course. A lot of the stuff we learned wasn't difficult to understand, and is very applicable to the real world. To anyone taking this course in the future, I recommend doing the bonus project at the end. It teaches you how every modern computer processor fundamentally works, and at the same time, teaches you to a degree how to do assembly code. From what I hear, this is good preparation for the course SFWR ENG 3GA3, which is all about programming processors at the assembly level.

However, this course may drastically change next year due to the fact that the current professor teaching it will most likely be leaving. Hopefully it will still stay as I described above.

Who was the prof when you took this course?

Amer Samarah. He was only a temporary professor and is gone now. I think you have Ryan Leduc this time. I've never had him before, but according to ratemyprofessors.ca, he's pretty decent.

You mentioned the difficulty of labs. But how did you personally find the course content? Also did you use the book too much or the prof's notes?

Leduc was a great prof, awesome course, labs were difficult