Paper Info
Title
Bringing bits, bytes, devices and computers to life with designs in multimedia logic
Abstract
A series of designs using the free logic emulation software, "Multimedia Logic," from www.softronix.com have been developed primarily to teach concepts of computer organization and architecture in undergraduate computer science classes, but have also proven to be valuable in bringing binary and hexadecimal numbers and concepts like IP subnet masks to life for IT students. These designs range from circuits to illustrate operation of a four bit adder to complete 8 and 16 bit computers. The computers are very well instrumented with displays for registers, memory contents and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) outputs. The 8 bit computer design also includes an assembler written in Perl and is illustrated in figure 2. One of the more valuable designs for IT students is an ALU that includes both binary and hexadecimal outputs shown in figure 1. The design clearly illustrates and/or functions, signed binary numbers, hexadecimal numbers, and other concepts. Memory devices with address, data, and control inputs and data outputs are illustrated with a simple project that strobes a memory device and sends the contents to an ASCII display device. Another important pedagogical outcome is a clear understanding of how machine language contents in a memory device control the data path in a computer, and provide the flexibility to change operation of the computer by merely changing the contents of memory. This paper provides design examples with operational illustrations to demonstrate the teaching value of the designs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1145/1029533.1029600
SIGITE Conference
Keywords
Field
DocType
memory content,memory device,bit computer design,bit computer,binary visualization,it student,logic simulation,ascii display device,multimedia logic,computer organization,bringing bit,memory device control,computer design,undergraduate computer science class,hexadecimal number,arithmetic logic unit
Byte,Hexadecimal,Programming language,Computer science,16-bit,Arithmetic logic unit,Machine code,Logic family,ASCII,Multimedia,Binary number
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-58113-936-5
0
0.34
References 
Authors
1
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Timothy Daryl Stanley192.53