In this article, we will explain the functionality of two very important electronic circuit elements: digital buffer and tri-state digital buffer. Buffer At first glance, the functionality of a digital buffer may seem very simple: the value at its input is propagated to its output. Fig. 1 Buffer symbol and truth table If the buffer [...]
Microcontrollers use pins for interfacing with the outside world. In general, the pins are the physical points on the package of an integrated circuit (IC) where a connection can be made to the printed circuit board. Behind each pin (inside the IC) there is a special circuitry used for driving it. This circuitry (usually called a [...]
Addressing Mode refers to the way the actual location of an instruction's operand is specified. It is used in the decode phase of the instruction cycle to extract the operand of the instruction so the proceeding execute phase can start. The main purpose of having different addressing modes is to provide flexibility when referencing the memory location of [...]
The microprocessor (also known as Central Processing Unit (CPU)) can be defined simply as a calculation machine. It executes predefined operations called instructions. The steps the CPU performs in order to execute an instruction is called an instruction cycle (also known as fetch-execute cycle or fetch-decode-execute cycle). Understanding the instruction cycle is a great starting point for [...]
Overview Speaking in general a bootloader is any piece of code that is executed before the main application code starts. In this article we will focus on a particular type of a bootloader - one that is used to erase the code of the main application from the flash memory and program it with a [...]
Overview There are two major types of memory system architectures when it comes to executing code in embedded systems: Execute in Place (XIP): The program code is executed directly from a flash memory. Store and Download (SnD) : The program code is stored in a non-volatile memory but is copied to RAM during the boot up [...]
Hardware memory is used for storing information. In the case of embedded systems that may be the program data ,the program code itself, event logging etc. There are many types of technologies used when creating memory cells and many ways to categorize them, but we can distinguish two major categories based on the memory reaction [...]
Exceptions are events that disrupt the normal execution flow of the program. When an exception occurs the processor handles it by usually executing dedicated piece of code called exception handler. Each type of exception can have its own exception handler. In some literature sources exceptions and interrupts are analyzed as two different things. Expeptions being [...]
A breakpoint is an intentional stopping place during an execution of a program. It is a powerful debugging feature allowing us to suspend the execution of the program at a certain point and examine the current values of variables and memory locations. The program can then be resumed from the exact point it was suspended. Adding or removing breakpoints [...]
We can generally define three levels of abstraction from the underlying hardware when we develop embedded programs: Machine Code Assembly Language High Level Language Machine code is the native language of the microprocessors (but it is not used for directly writing programs). So no matter at what level of abstraction we decide to write our [...]