Computers and microprocessors - 3PMEOMP2

Goal(s)

Have understood:

• the architecture of a microprocessor system: CPU/memory/peripherals/shared bus communication/memory layout,
• the role of the components of the external architecture of a CPU, i.e. exposed to the programmer: PC/SP/General purpose registers,
• what are the instruction set and addressing modes of a CPU,
• what is the execution stack and its usages,
• the development flow transforming a C code to a machine code,
• the different techniques for taking events into account in a microprocessor system (polling/interruption).

Be able to:

• program in C, at low level, a microprocessor system: information manipulation at bit granularity, interacting with a peripheral,
• use a development tool for programming and debugging a program at low-level by observing :
  • registers of the CPU and its peripherals,
  • the memory,
  • the step-by-step execution of a C or assembly code.

The different concepts discussed in this course are applied to a Texas Instrument MSP430 microcontroller.

Content(s)

Session 1

• Presentation of the architecture of a microprocessor system
• Introduction to the IAR Embedded Workbench development environment
• Interacting with a GPIO device in C

Session 2
Interacting with an external peripheral (DAC) connected to the MSP430 microcontroller by an SPI bus:

• writing functions to send a data to be converted to analog (requires the use of a GPIO peripheral and the USI peripheral),
• generation of different analog waveforms (square, sawtooth, sine).

Sessions 3 and 4

• C compilation flow
• External architecture of the CPU
• Instruction set and addressing modes

Session 5

• Execution stack
• Study of low-level function implementation mechanisms (calling/returning/passing parameters and return values)
• Recursive function calls

Session 6
Study and comparison of mechanisms for handling events in a microprocessor-based system (polling/interruption).

Basics of digital electronic
C programming