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Hardware · From a single transistor to hardware engineer

Hardware, start to finish

From electricity and one transistor to logic gates, a working processor and real circuit boards. Every lesson is a small machine you can step through, then a short quiz. No experience needed.

10 modules49 lessons4 special topics53 available now
0 of 53 available lessons completed
Part of: Hardware engineer
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Logic & TINY-8 playground

Put the ideas from this course to work in your own sandbox.

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Module 01 Beginner

Electricity basics

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

Module 02 Beginner

Semiconductors

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

Module 03 Beginner

Logic gates

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

Module 04 Intermediate

Combinational circuits

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

Module 05 Intermediate

Memory elements and clocks

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

Module 06 Intermediate

Memory

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

Module 07 Intermediate

Build a processor

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

Module 08 Advanced

Computer architecture

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

Module 09 Advanced

Digital design practice

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

Module 10 Advanced

Boards and embedded systems

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

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Special topics

Stand-alone deep dives. Take them any time after the module they build on.