General Aspects of Computer Organization

(Lecture-1)

R S Ananda Murthy

Associate Professor
Department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering,
Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering,
Mysore 570 006

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

Specific Learning Outcomes

After completing this lecture the student should be able to

List the four main blocks in a digital computer.
Explain the meaning of address bus, data bus and control
bus in a digital computer.
List the differences between a microprocessor and a
microcontroller.
Explain the meaning of bit, nibble, byte and word length of
a microcontroller or a microprocessor.
Explain how the word length of a processor affects its
performance.
Explain the meaning of address space.
Explain the Stored Program Concept of Von Neuman.

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

Functional Units in a Digital Computer

External External
World Input CPU Output World

Memory

Arrows indicate direction of information flow.

Central Processing Unit (CPU) executes the program
stored in memory.
Typical devices in input block: keyboard, mouse.
Typical devices in output block: monitor, speaker, printer.

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

Address, Data and Control Buses in Computer

Address Bus

Memory Input Real

Output World
CPU

Data Bus

Control Bus

A set of parallel wires is called a bus.

Address is output by the CPU on the address bus.
Data is transmitted between the CPU and other devices
over the data bus.
Control signals are transmitted over the control bus.

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

Microprocessor CPU on a Chip

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

Control Register Array

Unit (CU)

Arithmetic Logic
Unit (ALU)

CU generates signals required to fetch instructions from

the memory and execute them.
ALU performs arithmetic and logical operations.
Register array has registers to store data temporarily.
Microprocessor is a CPU on a single chip.

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

Microcontroller CPU and Peripherals on a Chip

Microcontroller

CPU R/WM ROM

Serial
I/O Timer/
COM
Ports Counter
Port

Some modern microcontrollers even have on-chip

Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) and Digital-to-Analog
Converter (DAC).

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

Bit, Nibble, Byte and Word Length of CPU

A binary digit is known as bit. It can be 0 or 1.

In modern digital computers all instructions and data are
represented using bits.
A group of four bits is a nibble. Eg. 1101, 1010.
A group of eight bits is a byte. Eg. 11011010, 10101010.
The data bus width is known as word length of CPU. For
eg. ATmega328 MCU has a word length of 1-byte because
its data bus width is 8-bits.
A CPU with longer word length is faster because it can
process more bits in one operation.

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

No. of Bits in Address and Address Space

Address in Binary Adr. Hex Memory

Starting 0000 0000 0000 0000B 0000H
0000 0000 0000 0001B 0001H
. . .
. . .
. . .
65536 Locations . . .
. . .
. . .
. . .

Ending 1111 1111 1111 1111B FFFFH

With N bits in the address, CPU can access 2N locations.

Eg. if there are 16-bits in the address as shown above,
then, the address space has 216 = 65536 locations.

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

Von Neumanns Stored Program Concept

Address Memory
0000 Byte
CPU 0001 Byte
0002 Byte
0003 Byte Content of
PC . a memory
0002 . location
.
0020 Halt
0021

Program Counter (PC) also known as Location Counter

in side the CPU points to the next instruction in the
memory to be fetched and executed.
PC stops incrementing when HALT instruction is
recognized by the CPU.

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization

License

This work is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

R S Ananda Murthy General Aspects of Computer Organization