Mini-project 1 released!

Mini-project 1 (very tasty but spicy project :) has been released. Click on this link! 

You are recommended to carefully read through the requirements. 

You should also pay attention to the deadlines for the submission and demo. 

Today's lab (Oct 09) is reserved to help you understand and start working with this mini-project. 

Lecture 1-7: A simple computer

We have summarized knowledge learnt from lecture 1 to 4 in order to understand how a CPU works.
In general, ISA are used by CU to control all operations of the CPU, e.g load data from registers, then select the bus to transfer it to ALU or Shifter for computational operations, and then transfer back to another register. We also discussed about functional blocks of a CPU in details.

We have also discussed about the value of Assembly language in terms of machine language as well as code debugging. 

Lecture 1-6: Arithmetic computation

We studied an important lecture of Module 1 about how an ALU of CPU is built up and functioning.

The key components such as half-adder and full-adder are introduced. An example of 4-bit Ripple-Carry Binary Adder (RCBA) is illustrated to show how a computer can do Addition in general.

Complement concept is refreshed to remind about how to do subtraction, then a RCBA-based circuit for both Addition and Subtraction is introduced. Based on the circuit, other functional circuit such as incrementer/decrementer, multiplier/dividers are discussed. 

Lecture 1-5: Digital circuits and combinational logic circus design

We have completed the lecture 5 - Digital circuits and combinational logic circus design.

In this lecture, we have learn how to build up an integrated circuit (functional circuits) from seven primitive logic gates (AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR). 

We have also studied how to build up the key functional integrated circuits (Enablers, Selectors, Decoders, Multiplexers, etc) from the primitive logic gates and inherit them to build up larger circuits, e.g. 3-to-8 decoder, multiplexers. 

Lecture 1-4: Number Systems

In this lecture, we learnt the following topics:
- Decimal, Binary, Octal, HexaDecimal number systems and the conversion between the number systems. 
- Four standard arithmetic computations and their computational operations. 
- Complement of a number in a r_base system
- Several examples of 1s and 2s complement to illustrate their implication in computer systems.
- The relationship between the 1s and 2s complements.

Lab 1-4

Click on Lab assignments to access Lab 1-4.

I highly recommend you to complete Lab 1-3 if you haven't done it. 

 

Lecture 1-3: Event-driven programming and FSM

We have reviewed the basic of the method of event-driven programming and FSM to get better understanding on how to write an embedded code for micro-controllers.

A typical example of light switching is illustrated with various case studies to highlight the concept of time automata, scheduling, modes in the embedded programming.