Abstract
The minimal set of components required to establish a computing system is denominated a Microcomputer. The basic structural description of an embedded system introduced in Chap. 1 showed us the integration between hardware and software components. This chapter discusses the basic hardware and software elements required to establish a computer system and how they interact to provide the operation of a stored program computer.
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Notes
- 1.
Hence, the name peripheral.
- 2.
Since speed has become an important feature to consider in applications, the term “RISC” has become almost a buzzword in the microcontroller market. The designer should check the truth of such labeling when selecting a microcontroller.
- 3.
Often, CPU have internal clocks that run faster than system clocks, at least four times. Thus, in literature we may see that an instruction takes only one clock cycle. This is true with respect to the system cycle, but the process was driven by the internal CPU clock which actually took several cycles.
- 4.
Instruction issue is a term frequently used in high-performance computer architectures to denote the transfer of decoded instruction information to a functional unit like an ALU, for execution.
- 5.
There are other types of overflow, like when the result of an arithmetic operation exceeds the number of bits allocated for its result. This condition however is not signaled by this flag, although particular CPUs may have another flag for this purpose.
- 6.
One can visualize this with the full interval in a numerical line. Starting at the midpoint, two consecutive walks in opposite directions, neither greater than half the interval length, will keep you inside the interval.
- 7.
RAM, an acronym for “Random Access Memory”, is a term coined in the 1950s to refer to solid state memories in which data could be accessed randomly, as opposed to other memory devices such as magnetic tapes and discs. Under this definition, semiconductor ROM devices are random access ones also, but the DRAM is not. But the terms are already stuck and understood by the embedded community.
- 8.
In the early days of computing, much of the work that defined the von Neumann architecture was developed by Princeton professor John von Neumann, after whom its named. Due to this affiliation, the von Neumann architecture is also called Princeton architecture.
- 9.
Centronics, although widely used in printers, never actually reached an official standard certification.
- 10.
An interesting online interpreter for the MSP430 instructions is found at http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/assemble.html.
- 11.
Just like the stacks of most graphic calculators and computer monitors, where new items appear at the bottom and not at the top.
- 12.
It receives the name “immediate” because at the machine level, the word containing the number goes immediately after the instruction word.
- 13.
Some interpreters, which work line by line, require the offset to be directly specified, while others accept the address and calculate the offset.
- 14.
Some people say that the number stems from the date April 30, associated somehow to the development of the first prototype. We mention this reference without actually knowing its truthness.
- 15.
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Jiménez, M., Palomera, R., Couvertier, I. (2014). Microcomputer Organization. In: Introduction to Embedded Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3143-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3143-5_3
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