Foundations of Microprogramming: Architecture, Software, and Applications discusses the foundations and trends in microprogramming, focusing on the architectural, software, and application aspects of microprogramming. The book reviews microprocessors, microprogramming concepts, and characteristics, as well as the architectural features in microprogrammed computers. The text explains support software and the different hierarchies or levels of languages. These include assembler languages which are mnemonic or symbolic representation of machine commands; the procedure oriented machine-dependent; and the procedure oriented machine independent. A simulator is used to interpret programs written in machine or micro-language before the instructions in the program can be run. A simulator and translator (which change some steps from one program written in another language to another program) should interface with the design language of the computer for these components to operate even when a new machine is developed. The book cites four existing computers which have "simple" diagonal microinstructions such as the Hewlett-Packard HP21MX and the Microdata 3200. Horizontal types of microinstructions allow parallel execution of many micro-operations, such as the Cal Data family of computers, the Varian 73, and the NANODATA QM-1. Microprogramming is applied in emulation, program enhancement, operating systems, signal processing, and graphics. The text can benefit programmers, computer engineers, computer technicians, and computer instructors dealing with many aspects of computers such as programming, hardware interface, networking, engineering or design.

Discusses microprogramming theory, applications and methodology.

One of the very important parts of any digital system is the control unit, coordin- ing interplay of other system blocks. As a rule, control units have irregular str- ture, which makes process of their logic circuits design very sophisticated. In case of complex logic controllers, the problem of system design is reduced practically to the design of control units. Actually, we observe a real technical boom connected with achievements in semiconductor technology. One of these is the development of integrated circuit known as the "systems-on-a-programmable- chip" (SoPC), where the number of elements approaches one billion. Because of the extreme complexity of microchips, it is very important to develop effective design methods oriented on particular properties of logical elements. Solution of this problem permits impr- ing functional capabilities of the target digital system inside single SoPC chip. As majority of researches point out, design methods used in case of industrial packages are, in case of complex digital system design, far from optimal. Similar problems concern the design of control units with standard ?eld-programmable logic devices (FPLD), such as PLA, PAL, GAL, CPLD, and FPGA. Let us point out that modern SoPC are based on CPLD or FPGA technology. Thus, the development of eff- tive design methods oriented on FPLD implementation of logic circuits used in the control units still remains the problem of great importance.

By the end of the 1960s, a new discipline named computer science had come into being. A new scientific paradigm--the 'computational paradigm'--was in place, suggesting that computer science had reached a certain level of maturity. Yet as a science it was still precociously young. New forces, some technological, some socio-economic, some cognitive impinged upon it, the outcome of which was that new kinds of computational problems arose over the next two decades. Indeed, by the beginning of the 1990's the structure of the computational paradigm looked markedly different in many important respects from how it was at the end of the 1960s. Author Subrata Dasgupta named the two decades from 1970 to 1990 as the second age of computer science to distinguish it from the preceding genesis of the science and the age of the Internet/World Wide Web that followed. This book describes the evolution of computer science in this second age in the form of seven overlapping, intermingling, parallel histories that unfold concurrently in the course of the two decades. Certain themes characteristic of this second age thread through this narrative: the desire for a genuine science of computing; the realization that computing is as much a human experience as it is a technological one; the search for a unified theory of intelligence spanning machines and mind; the desire to liberate the computational mind from the shackles of sequentiality; and, most ambitiously, a quest to subvert the very core of the computational paradigm itself. We see how the computer scientists of the second age address these desires and challenges, in what manner they succeed or fail and how, along the way, the shape of computational paradigm was altered. And to complete this history, the author asks and seeks to answer the question of how computer science shows evidence of progress over the course of its second age.