Engelska Studiehandboken kurser

Computer Science, Electrical Engineering

SMD082 Processor/Software Interface 6.0 ECTS credits

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General information about studying at Luleå university

TIMEPERIOD: II

LANGUAGE: English/Swedish

EXAMINER
Glenn Jennings Univ lekt

PREREQUISITES
Imperative programming.

COURSE AIM
The course is designed to give the student a basic competence in programming of a modern conventional processor at the lowest level, in order to be able to take part in both development of, and further instruction within, computer engineering and complex systems programming, for example real-time systems, compilers, operating systems. Subgoals: - to familiarize the student with those concepts and methods used to describe the programmer's model for a processor, so that he can evaluate and compare different architectures from a programmer's standpoint. - to introduce the student to reasoning about computational structures described as high-level synchronous hardware models. - to familiarize the student with the hardware structure of a modern pipelined microprocessor as well as its programming at the assembler level. - to give a basic understanding about the demands which the use of modern high-level languages and operating systems make on the processor's architecture. - to familiarize the student with the management of real-time events delivered by the processor's environment.

CONTENTS
Introduction to computer engineering. Concepts architecture and programmer's model. Characteristics of a good computer architecture. Machine abstraction levels. The instruction set. Data representations. Machine language and instruction formats. Address spaces, addressing. Operations on data. Computer arithmetic. Instructions for program flow control. Sequential programming of a modern pipelined microprocessor. Interface to the compiler. Structures for high-level programming. Data types. The stack, activation records, procedure calls and parameter passing. Interface to the operating system. Memory management. The process concept. Process protection and privileges. Context switching. Management of vectored interrupts and exceptions. Input/output, drivers. The modern processor's demands on the compiler. Model of a typical modern processor's internal construction. Pipelining. Interlocks, stalls, data forwarding. Instruction dependencies, hazards. Multiple issue. Delayed branch, branch prediction. Instruction scheduling and its effect on processor performance.

TEACHING
Instruction consists of lectures, lessions and compulsory assignments.

EXAMINATION
Written exam.
COURSE GRADE SCALE: U,3,4,5

ITEMS/CREDITS


Laboratory work                                             	1.5ECTS
Written exam                                                	4.5ECTS

COURSE LITTERATURE
D. Patterson, J. Hennessy: Computer Organization and Design, The Hardware/Software Interface (Morgan-Kaufmann 1994), and LSI Logic: LR33000 Self-Embedding Processor User's Manual (Lsi Logic Corp. 1993) or equivalent.

REMARKS

Last modified : 97-09-25
Further information: Glenn Jennings

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