Discussion on heuristic teaching method for arithmetic unit design

Arithmetic unit design has been one of the important and difficult parts in teaching of principles of computer organization course and is hard for students to understand and master. Because teaching of arithmetic unit design is usually began with examining the process of computer arithmetic, many students are apt to think it as numerical calculation and don't really understand the main idea in computer design of simplification, normalization and rapid processing. In this paper, we reveal the basic idea of computer arithmetic unit design by the analysis of data representation and the process of calculation, taking addition, subtraction and multiplication as example. Based on the background of our many years' teaching and research, we discuss some effective heuristic methods in teaching of arithmetic unit design.