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COM SCI M258A

Design of VLSI Circuits and Systems

4 units

Sections & times

Lecture and discussion. The registrar has published a final exam time.

Fall 2026: 1 lecture and 2 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 78 minutes ago.

Also listed as EC ENGR M216A (closed, 62 of 62 · 20 over enrolled, standing limit): the same class, and each department holds its own seats and its own grade history.

Grades

No grade history for this course: the data runs Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Sections for Fall 2026 are below. The same class is graded under EC ENGR M216A, where the history is kept.

Grade records describe outcomes. For what a course is like to take, read student reviews written on dibs below or follow the separate external review link.

Reviews for COM SCI M258A

Workload and assignments

Work types reported in BruinWalk reviews of this course, across recorded instructors and terms. They may differ from this term's syllabus.

dibs has not read this course’s reviews, so it cannot say what kind of work it sets. That is dibs not having looked. It is not a course without papers or exams, and the reviews linked below are the answer until dibs catches up.

Read the source reviews

What comes first

The chain dibs can see is 7 courses long before COM SCI M258A. This is a floor, not a deadline: dibs has not read a class page for EC ENGR 10 and MATH 3B, so the real chain can only be longer than this, never shorter.

Counted in courses rather than quarters: dibs does not know which of them a department lets you take together.

From the registrar's catalog

(Same as Electrical and Computer Engineering M216A.) Lecture, four hours; discussion, two hours; laboratory, four hours; outside study, two hours. Requisites: course M51A or Electrical and Computer Engineering M16, and Electrical and Computer Engineering 115A. Recommended: Electrical and Computer Engineering 115C. LSI/VLSI design and application in computer systems. Fundamental design techniques that can be used to implement complex integrated systems on chips. Letter grading.

Sections in Fall 2026

You enroll in the discussion, not the lecture, so a discussion's status is the one that decides whether you get in. A lecture can read open while every discussion under it is full.

Seat counts as of : the oldest of these 3 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.

From the people who took it

Student reviews

What taking COM SCI M258A was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.

Your experience could be the first.

No student reviews are available to read on dibs for this course yet. Took it? Tell the next person what helped, what was hard, and how you spent your time.

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External reviews are separate and do not count toward the dibs rating.

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Community guidelines

Seats over time in Fall 2026

How each lecture has filled since dibs first saw it.

A dot is a reading where something moved: the seat count, the status, or the waitlist.

What a flat run means, and where a line starts

Flat between dots means it did not drift, it held and then jumped, and a line starts when dibs first saw that lecture rather than reaching back before it existed. A lecture that has never moved draws a flat line across the whole window, and one with two or three readings draws a line joining them, which is too few to read a trend from.

Lec 1 · Markovic, D. · -

Unchanged over about 1 month

Both readings say 0 seats.

18 Aug 21:4010 Sep 00:562 Oct 04:12
dibs read 168 of the 503 hours its hourly record covers, 33%, and did not look in 335. dibs had no hourly record before 11 Sep, which is the other 561 of 1064 plotted.Seats from 18 Aug 21:40 to 2 Oct 04:12, 0 to 0. The line is flat across the whole window: recorded enrollment counts match. Changes between reads may be missed. dibs read 168 of the 503 hours its hourly record here covers, 33%. An hour marked as read confirms a check, not continuous monitoring. That check recorded no change; changes between checks may be missed. For 335 hours dibs was keeping a record and did not reach this section. Nothing before 11 September at 06:00, where this section's record starts, has a read either way, which is 561 hours of this window. Where the drawing is faint or broken, that never means the readings are doubtful. It means the stretch between them is unaccounted for.
How readings and alerts work

A reading and an hourly record are different things, and most charts here hold more of the second missing than present. dibs has taken readings of a section since long before it began keeping an hour-by-hour log of when it looked, so the empty stretches are dibs saying it was not keeping that log yet, not that it looked and found nothing. That is the age of the record and not a fault.

Seat counts show the last successful read, not live availability. Refreshes can be delayed by request limits or upstream interruptions. Watched sections receive priority, but an hourly update for every section is not guaranteed.

The registrar can change a seat count between our checks. Alerts depend on dibs detecting an opening and completing delivery; a quiet watch does not prove that no seat opened. Check the registrar before enrolling.