Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:29:29 -0500
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From: "Yale N. Patt" <patt@ece.utexas.edu>
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To: a.deshmukh@utexas.edu, mohammadbehnia@utexas.edu, chestercai@utexas.edu
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Subject: Re: EE460N: Question About Material
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Message-ID: <20190411222929.GC21507@ece.utexas.edu>
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References: <CAFV6asxU9wCuvz=__7-uA2U2_ZuSoVV_p+QX2rmfghcs7GWn1w@mail.gmail.com>
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A student writes:
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> Hi,
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> 
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> On Monday's lecture you mentioned you were going to talk about the kogge
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> stone adder in addition to CLA but you never got to it on Tuesday. Are we
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> going to need to know anything about kogge stone/other PG tree adders?
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The short answer is: NO!  The longer answer is: In my class you are never
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expected to understand for exam purposes on a Wednesday what I teach on
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Monday.  I think to require that would be unfair.  One needs time to listen
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to the lecture, discuss the concepts with study group partners, and work 
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problems before you should be expected to understand the concept well enough
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to tackle my exam questions.
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> Also, just for reference about Booth's Algorithm in EE460R which was sort
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> of mentioned during class. It gets covered during data path design but it
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> was never a requirement we needed to fully memorize.
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Ooops!  You said the naughty word: Memorize!
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I hope you are not planning to memorize anything for my exams.  Part of
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the reason I invite you to bring three sheets of paper into the closed
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book exam.
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> http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~mcdermot/vlsi1/main/lectures/lecture_12.pdf
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> Last 12 slides or so. Lecture 11 was adders including PG tree adders so
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> some students would know about them already though not many undergrads took
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> the class.
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>
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> Thanks,
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> <<name withheld to protect the student who is thinking of memorizing>>
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Thanks for the input.  With respect to PG tree adders, I may try to squeeze
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something in before the end of the semester since there is one beautiful
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concept involved: that one can reduce a historically linear problem to a log n
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problem by using trees which are inherently log n.  But given how the semester
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has been going, I may have to save it for the Microarchitecture course next
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spring.
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Good luck preparing for the exam.
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Yale Patt