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