Reading Questions

For The Elements of Computing Systems

For each of the following concepts or keywords, define and provide an example.

Hardware (I)

  1. Compilation
  2. The Church-Turing Conjecture (= Church-Turing Thesis)
  3. Abstraction
  4. Implementation
  5. Interface
  6. Hardware Description Language (HDL)

Boolean Logic (1)

  1. Logic gate
  2. Boolean algebra
  3. Boolean function
  4. Boolean operator
  5. Nand operator
  6. Boolean expression
  7. Truth table
  8. Logic gate
  9. Chip
  10. Composite gate
  11. Not operator
  12. And operator
  13. Or operator
  14. Xor operator
  15. Multiplexer
  16. Demultipleyer
  17. Multi-bit Not gate
  18. Multi-bit And gate
  19. Multi-bit Or gate
  20. Multi-bit Multiplexer
  21. Multi-way gates

Boolean Arithmetic (2)

  1. All digital computer functions can be reduced to adding binary numbers
  2. Decimal representation
  3. Binary representation
  4. Word size
  5. Bitwise operations
  6. Least significant bit
  7. Most significant bit
  8. Overflow
  9. Two’s (= radix) complement representation
  10. Half-adder
  11. Full-adder
  12. Adder
  13. Incrementer chip
  14. Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)
  15. Control bits
  16. Bitwise negation
  17. Bitwise and

Memory (3)

  1. Combinatorial (= time-independent) logic
  2. Sequential logic
  3. Clock
  4. Tick/tock
  5. Cycle
  6. Data flipflop (DFF)
  7. Memory hierarchy
  8. Addressing
  9. Register
  10. Random Access Memory (RAM)
  11. Program counter (PC)