[saltcured]

At UC Berkeley in the early-mid 90s, I think I had two digital design courses. The first was low level basics like understanding logic gates, flip flops, gray coding, PROM, ALUs, multiplexers, etc., with a physical project using 7000-series chips on breadboard. The second was the whole 32 bit MIPS/SPIM pipelined CPU design and simulation project based on the Patterson and Hennessy text book.

But, I seem to recall there were ways to bypass most hardware background knowledge for a CS degree. You had to do intro math and physics that did classical mechanics, but you could stop short of most of the electromagnetic stuff or multivariate calculus. You could get your breadth credits in other areas like statistics, philosophy, and biology. I think you could also bypass digital design with mix of other CS intro courses like algorithms, operating systems, compilers, graphics, database systems, and maybe AI?