Processor Interrupts
An interrupt is a signal to the processor indicating an event has occurred that needs immediate attention. When an interrupt occurs, the processors normal path of execution is interrupted in order to run a routine to service the interrupt requester. 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 ...
Factors in Choosing an Oscilloscope
An oscilloscope is an instrument used to display the waveform of electronic signals. It draws a graph of the voltage as a function of time. A digital oscilloscope can also store waveforms and perform mathematical analysis of the waveform. More ...
Microcontroller Registers
Registers are special small memory locations where the microcontroller can write data to or read data from. Special function registers help point to main memory locations, indicate the result of a mathematical operation, hold parts of an instruction or indicate the status of some operation or hardware feature. Some registers are general purpose and may be used by the programmer at their own discretion. More ...
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 ...
Microcontroller Internal EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) Memory
In some situations it is required that some program parameters such as configuration settings be keept after the system is powered off. This is made possible by including a EEPROM internally to the microcontroller. More ...
Simplified Windows Architecture Overview
A simplified overview of the Windows operating system architecture divides it into user-mode and kernel-mode components. More ...
Pentium P5 Processor
The Pentium P5 processor was introduced in 1993 was the first superscalar processor. It featured two integer pipelines and a pipelined floating-point unit. This article describes other innovations introduced in the P5. More ...
Online Color Coded Resistor Calculator
To determine the resistance value of a color-coded resistor, select the colors matching each band from the drop-down lists. More ...
The Motherboard Chipset
Because the chipset dictates the bus speed, type and amount of memory, and the type and number of I/O ports, much of a computer's performance is determined by its chipset. More ...
Operating System Memory Management
Computers must keep several programs in memory, creating a need for memory management. Many different memory-management schemes are used. The operating system Keeps track of which parts of memory are currently being used, and moves data into out of memory, and allocates and deallocates memory as required. More ...
Challenges of Programming Multicore Systems
Operating system designers must write scheduling algorithms that use multiple processing cores and application programmers, mustmodify existing programs and design new programs that are multithreaded. More ...
