ECE243 - “SPRING”
2008
Andreas Moshovos (*)
** Warning **
There may be errors or omissions in the notes that follow and of course I’m responsible for them. If you do spot an error please let me know. There no intentional errors in the notes. Irrespective of any typos and other errors, you are responsible for the “correct answer” to questions and problems.
How these relate to the recommended book: In our lectures we will use a slightly different order than the book and also emphasize some topics more than others. Accordingly, there may not always be a direct correspondence between a lecture and a book section. Where possible I will be noting the book sections each lecture corresponds to.
If you want to experiment with NIOS II programs outside of the labs I recommend purchasing a DE-1 board.
Chapter 8 from Altera’s NIOS II Processor Reference: NIOS II Instruction Reference
The complete NIOS II Processor Reference: NIOS II Processor Reference Handbook
THEMATIC SECTION
#1: Understanding what computers do at the low level:
What you need to know to successfully program a computer
Week of January 7
1. Introduction, course goals, digital systems and why they are useful.
(book chapter 1 except 1.6 & 1.7)
2. Using Binary Quantities to Represent Other Things.
(book 2.1)
**** Practice questions Answers
* More information about floating point numbers – we will not cover or discuss any of this material.
3. Behavioral Model of Memory.
(book 2.2 – 2.3)
* if there is time we will cover this in the lectures:
- The DE1 SRAM memory chip interface: lecture slides, datasheet
**** Practice questions
Week of January 14
4. Introduction to the NIOS II programming model.
(book 3.8 and some of 3.9 and 2.4)
Updated
on 16/1/2008. Updates shown in red.
5. Using Assembly to Write NIOS II programs.
(book 2.6, 3.10 and Ultragizmo manual 2.1)
Added 16/1/2008: Step-by-Step Examples of loads and stores
Week of January 21
6. Simple Control Flow (non straight-line sequencing).
(book 2.4.5, 2.4.6, 3.11.1, 3.11.2)
7. For loops, arrays and do-while loops.
(not as-is in the book related sections 2.11 and 3.15)
8. Subroutines – Requirements – Calling and
Returning
Week of January 28
9. Subroutines – Passing Arguments
Corrections
on Jan. 31
Examples of functions using strings as arguments
Strings are zero-terminated in C. So “lala” is stored in memory as five bytes: ‘l’, ‘a’, ‘l’, ‘a’, 0.
You can think of strings as arrays of bytes where the last element is always zero.
See lecture 2 for more information.
Week of February 4
11. Structures and recursive datatypes
12. Introduction to I/O Devices: The Parallel Port Interface (PIT)
Please ignore the digital design of the PIT interface and the circuits for address decoding. We will discuss these later in the course.
13. The Timer Device
Fixed typos and rewrote the introduction on Feb 6 and Feb 10.
Week of February
11
14. The Serial Port / Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART)
15. Introduction to Interrupts / UART
Week of February
18 is reading week
Week of February
25
THEMATIC SECTION #2:
Building Processors:
What you need to know to build a computer
(*) Permission is given to reproduce these notes provided that a notice of their origin is clearly given. All rights reserved just in case :)
Week of March 10
18. Modifying the single-cycle processor
19. Multi-cycle implementation: General principle and the datapath
**** Notes formatted for better printing
20. Multi-cycle implementation: The control
21. Modifying the multi-cycle implementation
Week of March 17,
2008
23. Bus-based datapath/control implementation
24. Memory Interface: Connecting to Memory and Devices
25. Memory-Mapped I/O: Physical Implementation
Week of March 24,
2008
26. Synthesizing Large Memory from Existing Components
27. Caches (Prof. Steffan) – We will be going over this material over several lectures
**** Additional Notes on Caches
Correction on April
9, 2008. Shown in red.
**** Examples on Caches and Execution Time
Week of March 31,
2008
Week of April 7,
2008
31. Instruction Set Classification
32. Emulating instructions in software
33. Virtual Memory and Pipelining Concept (no notes – not part of the material that will be tested in the final)