Hardware, start to finish

Charge, current and voltage, and how they behave in a simple circuit.

The materials that made computers possible, and the transistor: a switch with no moving parts.

How switches become logic: binary, AND, OR, NOT and the gates every chip is built from.

Circuits whose output depends only on their inputs: adders, selectors and the ALU.

Circuits that remember: latches, flip-flops, clocks, registers and state machines.

How computers store lots of bits: SRAM, DRAM, flash and the memory hierarchy.

Put it all together: an instruction set, a datapath and a control unit make a working CPU.

How modern processors go fast: caches, virtual memory, many cores and GPUs.

How engineers design real chips: hardware description languages, simulation, FPGAs and the ASIC flow.

Turning chips into products: microcontrollers, buses, circuit boards, power and debugging.