ECE-GY 9463: Special Topics in Computer Devices & Systems
For NYU MS students, the class will be offered initially in Spring 2026 as part of the Special Topics Series, ECE-GY 9463: Selected Topics in Computer Devices & Systems: Introduction to Applied Hardware Design.
Overview and Learning Objectives
This course provides a hands-on introduction to hardware design tailored for students with no prior hardware experience. Through practical labs, students will learn to:
- Identify tasks for hardware acceleration
- Design, simulate, and evaluate designs using high-level synthesis (HLS) and computer-aided design (CAD) simulation tools
- Integrate custom hardware into processor-based systems for real-world applications
- Deploy and test systems on FPGA boards
At the end of the class, students should be already able to build powerful, complex hardware for a range of domains such as communications, machine learning, signal processing, and scientific computing.
People
The course will be co-taught by:
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Prof. Sundeep Rangan: Sundeep has over 25 years experience in wireless industry in both academia and industry. Prior to joining NYU, he was a Co-Founder of Flarion Technologies and a Senior Director at Qualcomm where he oversaw several large-scale commercial ASIC projects. He is currently the Director of NYU Wireless.
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Prof. Siddharth Garg. Siddharth is an expert in machine learning, cyber-security and computer hardware design. In 2016, Siddharth was listed in Popular Science Magazine’s annual list of “Brilliant 10” researchers. Siddharth has received the NSF CAREER Award (2015), and paper awards at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) 2016, USENIX Security Symposium 2013, at the Semiconductor Research Consortium TECHCON in 2010, and the International Symposium on Quality in Electronic Design (ISQED) in 2009. Most recently, he has published seminal work in the area of AI for Chip Design.
Office hours and TAs are to be listed soon.
Pre-requisites
The course is open to all MS students from all majors, not just ECE or CSE. The only pre-requisite is some software experience at the undergraduate level. No hardware experience required. Our goal is to make hardware design accessible to everyone.
Labs
The material will be taught through a series of practical labs. Students will design and simulate hardware in Vitis HLS and Vivado, a powerful industry-standard computer-aided design tools from AMD. Most of the material can be done in simulation. Students will also be able deploy and test the designs on actual FPGA boards.
Tentative Grading
The tentative grading is:
- Homework / lab assignments (25%)
- Midterm (25%)
- Final (25%)
- Design project (25%)
In the design project, students will work in groups and build a complete hardware IP for any task of their choices.
Course Schedule
The tenatitve schedule is given in the course units page.
Support
The development of this course is supported in part by the NSF award, NRT: Chips for All: Empowering Researchers from Diverse Disciplines to Design Hardware, a project led by PI Siddharth Garg.