ECE243 - “SPRING”
2012
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 9
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.
Week of January 16
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 Updated
on Jan. 17, 2012. 2:13pm
4. Introduction to the NIOS II programming
model. Updated on Jan. 17, 2012. 2:13pm.
(book 3.8 and some of 3.9 and 2.4)
Practice questions: ADDI and immediates.
Week of January 18
5. Using Assembly to Write NIOS II programs.
(book 2.6, 3.10 and the MSL website)
Step-by-Step Examples of loads and stores
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)
Week of January 5
8. Subroutines – Requirements – Calling and
Returning
9. Subroutines – Passing Arguments
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.
Another
example of subroutine calls
Week of February 1
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
Week of February 8
11. Structures and recursive datatypes
14. The Serial Port / Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART)
15. Introduction to Interrupts / UART
Updated February
27, 2012 à JTAG UART is connected to IRQ8
Week of February 15
Reading week.
Week of February 22
THEMATIC SECTION
#2: Building Processors:
What you need to know to build a computer
18. Modifying the single-cycle processor
(*) Permission is given to reproduce these notes provided that a notice of their origin is clearly given. All rights reserved just in case :)
Weeks of March 1 and March 8
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
We skipped this à 22. Multi-programmed Control
Week of March 15
We skipped this à 23. Bus-based datapath/control implementation
24. Memory Interface: Connecting to Memory and Devices
25. Memory-Mapped I/O: Physical Implementation
Updated to new 32-bit GPIO/PIT ports. March 17, 17:35
Week of March 22
26. Synthesizing Large Memory from Existing Components
27. Caches (Prof. Steffan) – We will be going over this material over several lectures
Examples on Caches and Execution Time
Week of March 29
Week of April 5
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)