Assignment 1, due Jan 23

Always, on every assignment, please write your name legibly as it appears on your University ID and on the class list! All assignments will be due on Fridays at the start of class, and unless there is what insurance companies call "an act of God", the only exceptions to this rule will be by advance arrangement.

1. What is your E-mail address? (If you have more than one, give the address you'd prefer used for class purposes. We need this to build our class list.)

   Survey Questions

2. What programming languages have you used to write even small programs?

3. What programming languages have you used to write programs that you considered large?

4. What machine architectures have you studied -- at the level of the machine's assembly language or instruction set?

5. What processor implementations have you studied -- at levels below the instruction set (for example, at the level of gates and flipflops, the level of microcode, or the level of register-transfer logic)?

   Questions covering Prerequisites for the Course

   These questions are all recycled from a previous offering of this course, their only purpose is to get you to review the prerequisite material. They will be graded, but you can check your answer on the Internet from old posted solutions.

6. A, B and C are three one-bit binary numbers. S is the two-bit binary sum, where S₁ is the most significant bit and S₀ is the least significant bit. Give the truth table for a one-bit full adder that computes S = A + B + C.

7. The tripflop is a logic device with 3 outputs, Q_a, Q_b, and Q_c and 3 inputs, T_a T_b, and T_c. There are three 3-input nand gates in a tripflop, one per output:
   • Output Q_a is computed from inputs T_a, Q_b, and Q_c.
   • Output Q_b is computed from inputs T_b, Q_a, and Q_c.
   • Output Q_c is computed from inputs T_c, Q_a, and Q_c.

   a) With all inputs high, what are the stable states of a tripflop?

   b) What do you do to the inputs of a tripflop to flip it into one of its stable states?

8. To what does the term fetch-execute cycle refer? Give a short answer.

9. The steriotypical function call and return instructions save and restore the program counter on the stack. What additional work is done by the steriotypical interrupt and return from interrupt mechanism?

10. The fictional TurboFlam computer has a 13-bit word. The parallel port option on this machine has 13 input pins and 13 output pins (separate from each other), along with strobe and acnkowledge pins for each transfer direction. Explain the likely contents of the 3 input-output device interface registers in the TurboFlam parallel port interface.