Digital Design

CS 223 is where you stop treating the computer as a black box and start building one from the bottom up — transistors become gates, gates become arithmetic units and memory, and a finite state machine becomes something you can actually put on an FPGA. Expect weekly Verilog labs alongside problem sets on Boolean simplification, K-maps, and FSM design, with a midterm and final that test whether you can reason about timing, glitches, and state encoding on paper. It's the hardware foundation that CS 224 (Computer Organization) directly builds on, and it's the course that makes later topics like pipelining, caches, and even compilers feel grounded rather than magical.