Design, simulate, construct and testing of a computer system; simulation of the machine language and assembly language instructions; development of an operation code converter; detailed design of the control system and the arithmetic logic unit; integration and testing of the complete system. Oral and written presentations of design required. Required of computer engineering students. Prerequisite: EE-335 (minimum grade of C-).
A complete computer system will have a CPU, Memories and Input/Output capabilities.
The task of the Central Processing Unit ( CPU ) is to control the operation of the Computer. This includes keeping track of the instruction being executed ( store the instruction and the instruction address ), keeping track of the instruction execution phase, making the transfer of data between registers required by the execution of the instruction, and doing the arithmetic operations required.
All means of retaining data may be considered as memory for a computer. For our discussion of the computer, non electrically accessed data storage will be eliminated. In addition while fast acting registers are a means of electrically storing data, they are used in the CPU and therefore are not here classified as storage. In some computers these are also cache memory used to quickly have data and instructions readily available. This leaves us with the common forms of memory, such as Random Access Memory ( RAM ), Read Only Memory ( ROM ), Magnetic Disks, Magnetic tapes, Optical disks, CDROMs and similar devices. Other courses cover the magnetic and optical memory devices and we will, therefore, limit out discussion in this course to RAM. [Although ROMs may be chosen as part of the Logic chip set discussed later.
The category of Input/Output ( I/O ) deals wit how the computer transfers information to and from the outside world. These include input switches, register lights for each bit in a register, output screens, keyboards, printers and their connections, Internet connections. For our purposes, the I/O will be limited to switches and register lights to keep the project within the time frame of one semester.
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