Computer Architecture

A hardwired control unit is a control unit designed using hardware components such as logic gates, flip-flops, decoders etc. Well, there are two ways to design any control unit, it can be designed using hardwired control or using microprogrammed control. Both hardwired and microprogrammed control unit are implemented to generate the control signals required to fetch and … [Read more...] about Hardwired Control Unit

The number system we use in computers is a positional number system. The positional number represents a number as a series of digits where the value of each digit depends on its position in the number. The positional number is referred to as a weighted number system as each digit is related to a certain weight. In this section, we will study only those number systems under … [Read more...] about Number System in Computer

The universal serial bus (USB) is a standard interface for connecting a wide range of devices to the computer such as keyboard, mouse, smartphones, speakers, cameras etc. The USB was introduced for commercial use in the year 1995 at that time it has a data transfer speed of 12 megabits/s. With some improvement, a modified USB 2 was introduced which is also called a highspeed … [Read more...] about Universal Serial Bus (USB)

The I/O interface circuit is a mediator between the I/O device and the system to which this I/O has to be connected. In our earlier content bus structure, we had discussed a little about the I/O interface where we have seen that one end of the I/O interface is connected to the system bus and the other is connected to the input device. In this context, we will discuss the I/O … [Read more...] about Interface Circuit

Interrupt driven I/O is an approach to transfer data between 'memory' and 'I/O devices' through the 'processor'. The other two techniques for the same are programmed I/O and direct memory access (DMA). The interrupt-driven I/O involves the use of interrupt to exchange data between I/O and memory. In our previous content, programmed I/O we have seen it is a processor who … [Read more...] about Interrupt Driven I/O

Programmed I/O is one of the three techniques we use for I/O transfer. The other two methods for the same are interrupted I/O and (direct memory access) DMA. Programmed I/O is a technique or approach that we use to transfer data between the processor and the I/O module. If we talk of programmed I/O and interrupted I/O, it is the responsibility of the processor to control the … [Read more...] about Programmed I/O

Internal memory in the computer is the memory that is directly accessible by the processor without accessing the input-output channel of the computer. The internal memory is accessed by the processor over the system bus. In the section ahead we will discuss types of internal memories in computers and we will also look at the technique of error correction for internal memory … [Read more...] about Internal Memory in Computer Architecture

Bus structures in computer plays important role in connecting the internal components of the computer. The bus in the computer is the shared transmission medium. This means multiple components or devices use the same bus structure to transmit the information signals to each other. At a time only one pair of devices can use this bus to communicate with each other … [Read more...] about Bus Structure in Computer Architecture

Parallelism in a uniprocessor means a system with a single processor performing two or more than two tasks simultaneously. Parallelism can be achieved by two means hardware and software. Parallelism increases efficiency and reduces the time of processing. In this section, we will discuss the structure of a uniprocessor system, and how parallelism can be promoted in the … [Read more...] about Parallelism in Uniprocessor

An interrupt in computer architecture is a signal that requests the processor to suspend its current execution and service the occurred interrupt. To service the interrupt the processor executes the corresponding interrupt service routine (ISR). After the execution of the interrupt service routine, the processor resumes the execution of the suspended program. Interrupts can be … [Read more...] about Interrupts in Computer Architecture