4.CORE CONCEPTS OF MICROPROCESSORS

".....You cannot open a book without learning something.so lets open the doors to the labyrinth that greets us.."

The core concept of microprocessors is the Moore's law which was just a statement for Moore but for the world it tuned out to be a law that will determine the price-performance breakthrough.

In 1965, Gordon Moore,  co-founder of Intel with Robert Noyce, made the prediction related to the price-performance criteria . He stated that "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year".This statement received wide acceptance and was used for almost half a century as Moores law.It was later refined and revised.Today it states, broadly, that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double roughly every two years.The microprocessors  price-performance breakthrough could be predicted using this law.And even in the early days, he says, Intel's progress was out-performing Moore's law.

Before we move on with the programming side of our tale one must have a deep knowledge in Von Neuman stored program principle.It is the basis of computer programming. The principle includes :

a) We have to store the computer program, which is nothing but the set of instruction and computer executes them one other another as per the program requirement.

b) We have to store the program (i.e. set of instructions) in computer memory. The starting address of the program must be specified which executing the program and it is loaded into the program counter. After that program counter keeps track of the execution of the program till the end of the program.

c) Every program must be end with a stop or terminating instruction, otherwise the control unit will keep on fetching information from memory. Once it encounters a halt or stop instruction, execution stops.

Keeping these magic quotes in your mind lets move on to tame the wildest part of microprocessors -programming.

For the basic concepts of a microprocessor you can visit the next posts:a)Architecture b)Programmingc)Interfacing

...The book is now open ..the one who do not travel through it remains idle..