MicroprocessorsLaajuus (3 ECTS)

Objective

On completion of the course, the student understands the structure and operating principles of a conventional (CISC) microprocessor. The student knows how the CISC and RISC architectures differ and understands the importance of registers, instruction set and addressing modes.

The student will be capable of writing simple assembler programs and will be well-prepared to learn low level programming (e.g. device drivers) in assembler and C languages.

Content

- basic CPU structure
- machine language and instruction set
- data types
- storage of data in memory
- addressing modes
- interrupts
- principles of assembler programming
- CISC vs RISC and load/store architecture
- Intel 8086 and 80186 (or similar) microprocessor
- Basic ideas of other processor architectures

Qualifications

- Information Technology and Computing Skills
- Introduction to Programming
- Digital Fundamentals

Assessment criteria, satisfactory (1)

The student is able to write a simple assembly language program and is able to explain the operation of a simple assembly language program. He or she understands the basic operation of a microprocessor and understands the difference between the program and data memory. He or she understands how conditional branches work and how to call subroutines.

Assessment criteria, good (3)

The student is able to write a simple assembly language program and is able to explain the operation of a simple assembly language program. He or she understands the basic operation of a microprocessor and understands the difference between the program and data memory. He or she understands how conditional branches work and how to call subroutines. He or she understands how to use different addressing modes and is able to select suitable addressing modes for his or her programs. He or she understands the operation of stack memory and knows how the stack is used to store return addresses. He or she is able to write subroutines that use registers for parameter passing.

Assessment criteria, excellent (5)

The student is able to write a simple assembly language program and is able to explain the operation of a simple assembly language program. He or she understands the basic operation of a microprocessor and understands the difference between the program and data memory. He or she understands how conditional branches work and how to call subroutines. He or she understands how to use different addressing modes and is able to select suitable addressing modes for his or her programs. He or she understands the operation of stack memory and knows how the stack is used to store return addresses. He or she is able to write subroutines that use registers or stack memory for parameter passing. He or she is able to write interrupt based programs.