Cool subject but pretty poor teaching. It's extremely project-based; 90% of the grade is related to the final project, which involves designing and implementing a custom hardware accelerator for a RISC-V CPU. As exciting as the project is, you are offered very little guidance or formal instruction apart from the workshop manuals (which aren't written that well), so you mostly have to teach yourself with the help of AI. In many ways this subject feels less like a structured course and more like a capstone project. If you did well in Digital Systems, Embedded System Design and your C programming course, you'll have enough fundamentals to tackle this subject, but do expect to be thrown far into the deep end. Also make sure you have an x86 computer to ensure compatibility with the Linux VM you will develop in.

Anonymous, Semester 1, 2026