Ibrahim Hashim’s Design Notebook
Week of 25 Jan 2026
Project Work:
- Met with team and got caught up on what is required this semester.
- Went over onboarding labs 1-4.
Comments:
- I created my first design notebook and submitted my first pull request of the semester.
Week of 1 Feb 2026
Project Work:
- Made sure I knew and rememebered everything from onboarding labs 1-4.
Week of 8 Feb 2026
Project Work:
- Had no assigned work for this week.
Week of 15 Feb 2026
Project Work:
- Had a team meeting this week,
- Went over the NYU Processor Design Team SoC CPU Core report
Notes on the report:
- The overall design of the CPU is a 32 bit CPU using the RISC-V 32 instruction set
- It has a regular 5 stage pipeline like we took in comparch
- It uses a 2 bit branch predictor
- Its data cache is 2 way associative
- A question I have is if a different type of branch predictor would improve the performance of the CPU, specificially something more advanced, and what tradeoffs implementing something like that would have
- Why don’t we use data forwarding when the hazard detection stalls the pipeline using NOPs?
Week of 22 Feb 2026
Project Work:
- Went over the Design and Construction of RTL Toolchains at NYU report
Notes on the report:
- Cmake is the main tool used for building and similation
- vcpkg handles dependencies and catch2 gives us the testing framework
- A question I have: Are there things that are easier/more accurate to test in HDL that become harder when everything’s in C++?
- If we’re depending to heavily on verilator, isn’t it risky to put all our hope in this 1 tool since it could have bugs or limitations?
Week of 1 Mar 2026
Project Work:
- Chose a subteam for the main project (core)
Week of 8 Mar 2026
Project Work:
- No work assigned. Watched some videos about Von Neumann Architecture.
Week of 15 Mar 2026
Project Work:
- Spring break! :)
Week of 22 Mar 2026
Project Work:
- No work assigned.
Week of 29 Mar 2026
Project Work:
- Could not attend this week’s meeting due to roommate injuring his ankle, so I do not have a team.
- For final project, I researched what an MPW was, and found that using one can reduce the cost of prototyping to 10 or 5% of the original price, which is a steep discount. I am still researching ways for us to implement this.