The microprocessor systems design course explores the architectures for microprocessors and the supporting components for application. Topics include microprocessor components, design, analysis and performance of microprocessor architectures, comparison of design paradigms for architectures such as CISC, RISC, and DSP, instruction level parallelism, bus timing analysis, design considerations for high-performance systems, execution problems, memory architectures and performance, benchmarking and optimization, parallel architectures and processing, systolic and data flow architectures, multiprocessor performance and iterations, power dissipation, support software, and simulation tools.