In computer science and computer engineering, a microarchitecture (sometime abbreviated to µarch or uarch) is the design and layout of a microprocessor, microcontroller, or digital signal processor. Microarchitecture considerations include overall block design. Examples of this include the number of execution units, the type of execution units (such as floating point, integer, branch prediction, SIMD), the nature of the pipelining (which might include such stages as instruction fetch, decode, assign, execution, completion in a very simple pipeline), cache memory design (level 1, level 2 interfaces), and peripheral support.