CSI 2121 Principles of Assembly Language Programming

(3 hours of lecture per week, 1.5 hours of lab per week, 3 credits).

Assembly language fundamentals, addressing modes, number representations, arithmetic and logic instructions, program control instructions, array processing. Procedures, parameters passing, stack operations and interfacing with high-level language. System
functions interrupts, and input/output operations.
Prerequisite: CSI2111. Corequisite: CSI2167.

Professor

Jelber Sayyad
sayyad-csi2121@site.uottawa.ca This email address is dedicated to CSI2121 and should be used for all matters related to this course.
Office: SITE 4027

Important Announcements

Important announcements (of important events like exams, assignments...) will be sent to the class by email. To received these emails, you must be registered to this course.

Office Hours

Wednesday, 14:30 to 16:00

Time table (Winter 2003)

LEC 1 - Wednesday 13:00 - 14:30 STE H0104
LEC 2 - Friday          11:30 - 13:00 STE H0104
        First Lab on Tuesday January, 14, 2003
LAB 1 - Wednesday 08:30 - 10:00 STE 0131
LAB 2 - Tuesday      17:30 - 19:00 STE 0130
LAB 3 - Wednesday 17:30 - 19:00 STE 0130
You must attend all lectures (LEC), and only one laboratory group (LAB)

Time and location of the mid-term exam

Date: March 2, 2003 Time: 11:00 AM Room: MNT 203.

Your TAs

Mohak Shah    mshah@site.uottawa.ca       LAB
Victor Jin         vjin@site.uottawa.ca            Wednesday 2:30-4:00 SITE 3014
Waylan Wang wenlwang@site.uottawa.ca Friday          2:30-4:00 CBY-B405

Evaluation

Exam component: 75% of your final mark.
Assignment component: 25% of your final mark.
There will be two exams. The final exam will count for 2/3 of the exam component of your mark and the mid-term exam will count for 1/3 of the exam component.
Your mid-term exam mark WILL NOT be replaced by your final exam mark.
If your exam component (1/3 from midterm + 2/3 from final exam) is less than 50%, then your mark will be determined according to the same calculation but without exceeding the the maximum of D. Note that D+ is the passing mark.

General philosophy of this course

    In the previous course, CSI 2111/2511, you have learned the subject of computer
    architecture by following a "bottom-up" approach. By starting from basic hardware
    components (transistors and logic gates) to construct more sophisticated circuits
    (flip-flops, registers, multiplexers, decoders, adders...), you have seen how the
    processor, memory and a whole computer system is structured. Conversely, this course
    examines computer architectures by following a "top-to-bottom" strategy. It builds
    from the knowledge you have about high-level languages like C/C++ or Pascal, and
    teaches computer architectures from the programmer's point of view. Hence you will
    learn the actions that the processor must do to perform the tasks that are formulated in a
    high-level language. This implies, that you need to learn the set of "basic actions" that
    a processor can do: its instruction set, and how a high-level language compiler
    decomposes the high-level language commands into machine-level instructions.
    However, this can be achieved only by learning the instruction set of a processor at the
    symbolic (and humanly understandable) level: the assembly language level .
    Consequently, you will learn how to program a processor in assembly language in order
    to perform the tasks that are normally formulated in high-level language. We will use
    the Pentium processor from Intel and the TASM32 assembler from Borland.

Objectives

Understand the differences between machine language, assembly language, and high level languages.
Become familiar with the instruction set of a processor, namely the Intel's Pentium.
Understand how high-level language commands are broken into processor-level instructions.
Acquire a good understanding of interrupts and exceptions.

Course content

Introduction and computer architecture basics.

Number systems and data representation.

Registers, variables, arrays, and addressing modes.

Integer arithmetic and logical operations.

Flow control instructions.

Procedures, the stack, activation records, and parameter passing.

Floating point representation and arithmetic.

High-level language interface.

Assembling, linking, and loading of a program.

Input and Output (programmed I/O, interrupt-driven I/O, and DMA).

Interrupts and Exception Handling.

References

All the material you need for this course is available in the lecture notes. Most of these notes are provided courtesy of Professor Mario Marchand. Occasional extra notes will be provided per need as we progress through the course. Hence there is no compulsory textbook for this course. Here is a list of suggested references:

Randall Hyde, The Art of Assembly Language Programming . This is an excellent book with lots of information and it is available for free on the web! Also, the 32-bit version is now available! A gold mine!
Karen Miller, An Assembly Language Introduction to Computer Architecture , Oxford University Press (1999). A very good book to learn data representation and basics of computer architectures. Moreover, it uses only clean 32-bit protected-mode programming with the flat memory model but, unfortunately, it is too short on the instruction set.

Intel's Literature Center

Consult Intel's literature center to get the definitive information about Intel's processors. In particular, consult Intel's Architecture Software Developers Manual Vol 1, 2, and 3 of the desired processor.