Computer Buses
A 16-bit bus can transfer 16 binary bits simultainiously. This requires 16 separate metal traces on a PC board. We also need traces for control signals. The whole group of traces is referred to as a bus. 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 ...
Shortest-Job-First 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 shortest-job-first scheduling. More ...
Oscilloscope Required for Serious Digital Electronics Work
The oscilloscope is an instrument that displays digital signals on a line graph with time on the horizontal axis and voltage on the vertical axis. It will be difficult to do digital logic design without the use of an oscilloscope. More ...
Logical Versus Physical Memory Addresses
Computers use logical and physical addresses to access memory locatiuons. The CPU generates logical addresses. At run-time the Memory Management Unit (MMU) maps logical addresses to physical addresses. More ...
Intel's Core 2 Processors
Intel's Core 2 processors, released in July of 2006, are based on the Core microarchitecture, a dual core design using a 65nm manufacturing process to put 291 million transistors on a 143 square mm die. Each core has its own 64KB L1 cache. The two cores share an L2 cache that can be either 2MB or 4MB. More ...
Intel's Dual-Core Core i3 Processor
Core i3 is an entry-level 2-core processor using the 32nm Westmere micro-architecture. With a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 73 watts, the i3-530 is a cool-running chip that doesn't gobble loads of electricity, so those looking for a power-efficient, quiet machine will be happy with it. More ...
Capacitors in AC Circuits
In an AC circuit capacitors exhibit a property similar to resistance called reactance and cause a phase shift between votage and current. The vector sum of resistance and reactance in an AC circuit is called impedance. More ...
AMD Sempron Processor
The Sempron replaced the Duron as AMD's budget processor. The socket A Sempron is basically an Athlon XP with half the cache. The socket 754 Sempron is a cut down version of the Athlon 64 processor with half the cache. 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 ...
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 ...
Analog to Digital Convertion with a Microcontroller
Analog-to-digital conversion (or A/D conversion), is an electronic process that converts a continuously variable signal into a digital signal (expressed as a string of 1s and 0s). More ...
