The Microcontroller Interrupt System
Events related to peripheral interfaces are asynchronous to the program running on the CPU. The interrupt mechanism allows an external event to temporarily put the normal execution of the microcontroller on hold and force the execution of a specific subroutine. More ...
Basic Decoder Circuitry
A microprocessors is a circuit that reads and execute program instructions called opcodes. A decoder is a circuit that converts an opcode into signals tused to control the circuitry of the microprocessor to enable it to perform the instruction. More ...
Interrupt Request Lines (IRQs)
What happens when the CPU (Central Processor Unit) is busy doing something, like defragmenting the hard disk, and you press a key on the keyboard? An interrupt (IRQ) is a connection between a hardware device and the CPU. A hardware device uses it's assigned IRQ line to signal or interrupt the CPU when it needs attention. More ...
Processor Affinity in Symmetric Multiprocessing
Processor Affinity refers to a process's tendency to continue running on the processor on which it is currently running. When a process executes on a CPU, that process's cache is populated with its most recently accessed data, if a process is moved to a different CPU, that second processor's cache must be populated with that data. More ...
Arduino Microcontroller Development Platform
The benefit of the open source Arduino Microcontroller Development Platform is that the software is free and the hardware is cheap. This makes it one of the cheapest platforms on which to develop prototypes. More ...
Introduction to Computer System Main Memory Operation
The CPU can be shared by a set of processes. Using CPU scheduling, we can improve the utilization of the CPU and the speed of the computer's response. To realize this increase in performance, multiple processes must be kept in memory. More ...
Microcontroller's Parallel I/O System
The most common way for microcontrollers to interact with the outside world is the The digital I/O lines. More ...
The Fetch, Decode, Execute Cycle
The Fetch, Decode, Execute cycle is paramount to the functioning of a microprocessor. In this article I'll describe the Fetch, Decode, Execute cycle simplified to its bare-bones in a highly simplified fictitious microprocessor. More ...
The AMD Athlon 64 X2 Processor
The Athlon 64 X2 is the first dual-core CPU manufactured by AMD.
It is essentially two Athlon 64 cores on one die joined together with additional control logic. The cores share one dual-channel memory controller. The benefit of dual-core processors is their ability to process more software threads at the same time. However, many programs are written with only one thread. More ...
The Microcontroller Memory Map
a microcontroller is a set of resources. Each resource is identified by one or more addresses in an address space. The memory map is a graphic representation of how the resources are associated with addresses. More ...
Getting started with Raspberry Pi
So you have a Raspberry Pi, or you're thinking of getting one, and you want to know how to get started and how to become a master user of one. More ...
Computer Video Display
If you view a computer as an input-processing-output machine, you can use a keyboard or removable storage device as the input, a program as the processing, but what can you use to retrieve the output? One way to acquire the output, be it text or graphics, is with a video display. More ...
