Computers as Components
Class Schedule
The homework exercise that you should be working on during the week is listed, along with the important ideas covered by that homework. Each homework title is a link to the corresponding assignment.
Quick link to a week:
Week 1
8/24: Introduction
- Course goals
- Course mechanics
- Complex systems from a digital perspective
8/26: CPU architecture
- Registers and memory
- Expression evaluation and the stack
Required reading:
- Text Chapters 1, 2, 4, Sections 5.2.1, 5.3, 5.4, 6.1
8/28: Control flow
- The condition code
- Conditional jumps
- Unconditional jumps
Required reading:
- Text Sections 4.2.6, 4.2.7, 4.2.8, 6.2
Week 2
8/31: Procedure call and return
- How the call and return operations use the stack
- Passing arguments via the stack
- Use of A6 to access arguments
- Saving and restoring state
Required reading:
- Text Section 4.2.4, 4.2.6, 6.3, 9.4
9/2: Program structure
- Allocation of program structures to memory
- Public symbols
- C naming conventions
Required reading:
- Text Section 5.2
9/4: Binary integer arithmetic
- Representation of integers
- Translation of numbers from decimal to binary
- 2's complement arithmetic
- Signed and unsigned numbers
- Signed and unsigned condition code interpretations
Required reading:
- Text Section 3.1, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4
Week 3
9/7: Labor Days - No Classes
9/9: Pointers, characters, and strings
- Representing things other than integers
- C calling conventions
Required reading:
- Text Sections 3.4, 7.6.3
9/11: Bit manipulation
- Bitwise operations
- Masks
- Shifts
- Decoding an instruction
Required reading:
- Text Chapter 8
Week 4
9/14: Assembler directives
- How directives are used to separate data layout from code
- Storage reservation and data generation
- ORG, EQU, DC
Required reading:
- Text Section 5.2
9/16: Recursion
- Interface specifications
- Use of the stack for local variables
- The concept of an activation record
- Printing integer values as digit sequences
Required reading:
- Text Section 9.4
9/18: Modularity and separate assembly
- Separation of concerns and information hiding
- Visibility and lifetime
- Assembly and linkage
Required reading:
- Text Section 9.2
Week 5
9/21: Large data aggregates
- Separate address spaces
- Contiguous address spaces
Required reading:
- Text Sections 9.3.1, 9.3.3, 9.3.4
9/23: Special instructions
- Decimal arithmetic
- Address manipulation instructions
- Looping instruction -- DBcc
Required reading:
- Text Sections 3.2, 7.5, 9.1, 6.2.4
9/25: Programming examples
- What would you like to see?
Week 6
9/28: Serial I/O
- Access to I/O devices
- The RS-232 interface
- The function of a UART
Required reading:
9/30: Serial I/O (continued)
- Programming the UART
- Writing characters to the UART
- Reading characters from the UART
10/2: Review for Exam 1
Week 7
10/5: First examination, covering material through week 6
10/7: Interrupts
- How interrupts affect the CPU
- When interrupts can and cannot occur
- Interrupt priority
Required reading:
10/9: Interrupts (continued)
- Interrupt-driven serial I/O
Week 8
10/12: Buffering and buffer management
- Buffering for data-rate averaging
- Use of multiple buffers
- Circular buffers
Required reading:
10/14: Buffering and buffer management (continued)
- Circular buffer management routines
10/16: Block transfers and DMA
- The cost of interrupt-driven I/O
- Block transfer data paths and cycle stealing
- Bus timing
- Interaction between DMA controller and device controller
Required reading:
Week 9
10/19: Block transfers and DMA (continued)
- Setup operations for block transfer
- Bus mastery
10/21: Digital/Analog Conversion
- Sampling analog waveforms
- Conversion between analog and digital representations
Required reading:
10/23: Concurrency
- Cooperating sequential processes
- Minimal assumptions about process behavior
- Critical sections and mutual exclusion
- Semaphores
- Preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling
Required reading:
- Tanenbaum Sections 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
- Reentrancy
Week 10
10/26: Time
- The system clock
- Use of timers
- Timer modes - auto-reset and square wave generation
- Timers and interrupts
Required reading:
- Tanenbaum Sections 3.8.1, 3.8.2
- Counter/Timers
10/28: Snow day
10/30: Process management
- Semaphores and buffers
- Dining Philosophers
Required reading:
- Tanenbaum Sections 2.4.1, 2.4.2
Week 11
11/2: Binary floating point arithmetic
- IEEE standard number representation
- Normalization
- What is ``roundoff'' error?
Required reading:
- Text Section 3.3
- IEEE Arithmetic
11/4: Coprocessor interaction: GPUs
- Closely-coupled processors
- Coding of floating-point operations
- Example: NVidia's CUDA library for its GPUs
Required reading:
- Text Section 13.2.5
- (suggested) NVIDIA CUDA Programming Guide
11/6: Memory management
- Base and limit
- Paging
Required reading:
- Tanenbaum Sections 4.1, 4.2.1, 4.3.1
Week 12
11/9: Review for Exam 2
- This time can also be used to catch up
11/11: Second examination, covering material through week 11
11/13: Memory management (continued)
- Segmentation
Required reading:
- Tanenbaum Section 4.3.2
Week 13
11/16: Memory management (continued)
- Associative memory
11/18: Introduction to caches
- Description of caches
- Cache design issues
- Direct Mapped Caches
Required reading:
11/20: Introduction to caches (continued)
- Fully Associative Caches
- Set-Associative Caches
Week 14
11/23 - 11/27: Fall Break - No Classes
Week 15
11/30 - 12/4: Complex Data Structures in C and Assembly
Week 16
12/7 - 12/9: Complex Data Structures in C and Assembly (continued)
12/14: Conclusion & review for the final examination