Microcontrollers
A microcontroller is an IC that contains a microprocessor as well as RAM, ROM and general I/O ports. Engineers design microcontrollers into specific-purpose devices such as microwave ovens, cars, washing machines, refridgerators, and even space probes. More ...
Stored Program Architecture
Almost every computer system ever made is based on the stored program architecture designed in 1945 design by the mathematician John Von Neumann. He described a system where data and instructions would be stored in memory. More ...
The Many Processes of Silicon Wafer Manufacturing
A silicon wafer is a thin, circular disc used in the manufacture of integrated circuits and semiconductors. The silicon wafer manufacturing process is interesting. More ...
Pi-Top kit - Build Your Own Laptop
Computer hobbyists has been building their own desktop computers since the mid 1980's, but I know of no laptop kits, until now. The Pi-Top is a kit that lets you build your own laptop. More ...
Dynamic Loading of Program Routines and Dynamically linked libraries (DLLs)
In order to execute, it is not necessary for an entire program to be in physical memory. With dynamic loading, a routine is not loaded until it is called. More ...
Digital to Analog Convertion with a Microcontroller
Digital to analog conversion (DAC) is the process by which a digital signal (expressed as a string of 1s and 0s) are converted to an analog signal (a continuously varying voltage). More ...
Binary Floating-Point Numbers
Floating-point numbers allow you to use the very large, and very small, numbers commonly found in scientific calculations. A binary floating-point number consists of three parts, the sign bit, the mantissa and the exponent. More ...
Priority CPU Scheduling Algorithm
CPU Scheduling deals with the problem of deciding which of the processes in the ready queue is to be alocated the CPU. There are many different CPU scheduling algorithms. In this article we describe priority CPU scheduling. More ...
Simplified Windows Architecture Overview
A simplified overview of the Windows operating system architecture divides it into user-mode and kernel-mode components. More ...
Basic Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) Circuitry
One of the primary functions performed by a computer is mathematics. This article describes some of the logic circuits used to create the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of a microprocessor. 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 ...
Fundamental Digital Logic Gates
All the advanced features of the most powerful computers, such as mulicore and parallel processing are done with digital logic. In this article I explain the fundamental concept of digital logic in simple and clear language so that anyone can understand it. More ...
