The Microprocessor-based PC System

Microprocessor Course Electrical Engineering Department University of Indonesia

Bus, Memory & I/O Section

Fig. 1.2 shows the general block diagram of the PC A bus is a set of common connections that carry the same type of information The memory system is divided into three main parts: TPA, system area, XMS (optional)
The pentium Pro-based computer system, for example, can have up to 1M less than 4G or 64G of extended memory (Fig. 1.3)

Bus, Memory & I/O Section (contd)

The Transient Program Area (TPA) holds the OS and other program that control the computer system It also stores any currently active or inactive application programs The length of TPA is 640 KB The memory map (fig. 1.4), hexadecimal addr.) shows how many areas of the TPA are used for system programs, data, and drivers

Bus, Memory & I/O Section (contd)

The interrupt vectors access various features of the DOS, BIOS (Basic I/O System), and application The BIOS and DOS communications areas contain transient data used by program to access I/O devices and internal features of the computer system The IO.SYS is a program that loads into the TPA from the disk whenever an MSDOS or PC DOS system is started

Bus, Memory & I/O Section (contd)

The MSDOS (PCDOS) program occupies two areas of memory The size of the driver area and # of drivers change from one computer to another The COMMAND.COM program controls the operation of the computer from the keyboard The free TPA area holds application programs as they are executed

Bus, Memory & I/O Section (contd)

The system area (Fig. 1.5) contains program on either a read-only memory or flash memory and also areas of read/write (RAM) memory for data storage The area at locations C8000H-DFFFFH is often open or free. It is usually used for the Expanded Memory System (EMS) -> Fig.1.6 The EMS allows a 64 KB page frame of memory to be used by application programs

Bus, Memory & I/O Section (contd)

The input/output space extends from I/O port 0000H to port FFFFH. An I/O port is similar to a memory address but addresses an I/O device The I/O area contains two major sections (Fig 1.7):
the area below I/O location 0500H is reserved for system devices the remaining area is available I/O space for expansion

The Microprocessor
The microprocessor is the controlling element in a computer system and is sometimes referred to as the CPU (Central Processing Unit) Memory and I/O are controlled through instructions that are stored in the memory and executed by the microprocessor The microprocessor performs three main tasks for the computer system:

The Microprocessor (contd)

Data transfer between itself and the memory or I/O systems simple arithmetic & logic operations (Table 1.3) program flow via simple decisions

Why the microprocessor is powerful?

Able to execute millions of instructions per second from a program or software (group of instructions) stored in the memory system able to make simple decision, based upon numerical facts (Table 1.4)

Buses
The microprocessor controls memory and I/O through a series of connections called buses A bus is a common group of wires that interconnect components in a computer system Buses select an I/O or memory device, transfer data between an I/O device or memory and the microprocessor, and control the I/O and memory system

Buses
Three buses exist for the transfer of information: address, data, control (Fig 1.8) The address bus requests a memory location from the memory or an I/O location from the I/O devices Table 1.5 depicts a complete listing of bus and memory sizes on the Intel family of p Figure 1.9 shows the memory width and sizes of 8086-80486 and Pentium p

Buses
The memory sizes and organizations differ between various member of the Intel p familiy The control bus contains lines that select the memory or I/O and cause them to perform a read or write operation. Four control bus connections: MRDC, MWTC, IORC, IOWC

Buses
The micro-instructions for READ:
the p reads the contain of memory location by sending the memory an address through address bus the p sends the memory read control signal (MRDC) to cause memory to read data the data read from the memory are passed to the microprocessor through the data bus