Lab 3 - ISA Familiarization, Assembly Programming and Software Debug

Short Description
an assembly program works as well as be able to write your own assembly programs. …. The memdump.hex is output in Intel hex format so …

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Content
Lab 3 - ISA Familiarization, Assembly Programming and
Software Debug
Fall 2007
1 Writing Assembly Test Program
1.1 Background
1.1.1 Instruction Set Architecture
The instruction set architecture (ISA) that we will be implementing this semester is the MIPS ISA found in your
text book. It is extremely important that you understand what each instruction is supposed to do before you
design your processor.
There are a few things that you should know right away. the address space is limited to 16 bits, not 32. Due to
memory constraints the end of memory is 0×7FFC, but this should be plenty of room for any programs you will
write in assembly. There is an additional instruction not found in the text book, this is the test and set load (tsl)
instruction. This is how you will acquire locks for threading later in the semester.
To get another detailed view of the ISA issue this command:
> asm -i
NOTE
If you need another reference for the ISA refer to your book.
1.1.2 Writing Assembly Code
As you proceed with designing, testing and debugging your processor’s design, you will have to understand how
an assembly program works as well as…