What transulates Machine language into real signals

[ammarr]

Hi

Thank you very much for the course, its a great course and until now i learned allot about how things work.

I read the book till chapter 6, i started chapter 7 now, but there is one question in my mind that's still bugging me

after chapter 3 and chapter 5, nearly all the Chips have been done, and how they work

but i still don't understand how can a command like 1100001010000001, be understood by a piece of hardware, a chip

how can the line 1100001010000001, be converted into an electrical signal..

i mean now when we try to connect wood to a concrete we use steel pin

am just trying to understand how these 2 worlds are connected the software and hardware


i understood chapter 1 to 3 very well (how chips are build on top of each other)

and i understood chapter 6 very well (how software languages are built from machine to (low)assembly to higher and higher)

but not how the hardware and software talk to each other.

thanks for any hint or suggestion or direction

Thanks

[cadet1620]

There are two general methods to get software onto hardware.

Cross development, what I do mostly in my job, consists of running the compilers, linkers, and debugging tools on a powerful computer like a PC, and using a programmer/debugger that connects the PC to the target hardware I am working with. The PC loads the software into the ROM on the hardware using the programmer/debugger. The debugger running on the PC is a lot like the CPU emulator, but much more capable.

Local development, using a PC to write a program that runs on the PC, uses the software development tools on the PC and writes the executable files for the program to the hard disk. When the program needs to be run, the PC's operation system loads the program from hard disk into the PC's RAM, and the program runs. (A PC's hardware is much more complex than Hack's, and allows programs to run from RAM as well as ROM.)

--Mark

[ammarr]

thanks

when you say

cadet1620 wrote

The PC loads the software into the ROM on the hardware using the programmer/debugger.
--Mark

The ROM which up to my understanding is a piece of silicon an IC.

how can this store instructions, store software instructions

inside this IC, what does 0 and 1 means.

thanks

[cadet1620]

The earliest semiconductor ROMS were not programmable. The bit values were encoded with diodes created when the IC was manufactured. These were called "mask programmed" ROMS.

Later came "one time programmable" ROMS. They came with diodes for every bit of every address so all the addresses read all ones. There was circuitry in the IC to allow the user to burn out diodes the didn't want, turning individual one bits to zeros.

Modern EEPROMs are much more complex and depend on quantum physical effects to program their bits. You'll need to research this on your own; it's too technical for this forum. "floating gate EEPROM" might be a good starting point.

--Mark

[ammarr]

Thanks alot Mark

EEPROM is a good start.

Regards

[arizonace]

From my interpretation of the original question, my explanation is that the information was always an electrical signal since the moment you typed it or downloaded it or read it from disk. The fact that it has "also" been displayed or thought of otherwise is no impedance to its electrical existence.

From the moment current flows from the wall into the computer through the voltage regulator, every bit of information exists as an electrical signal whether it passes through a logic gate or, a flip-flop or a memory register or instruction register or a PCI bus or an LCD pixel or a modem or wireless signal or speaker output or the electrical contacts of a keyboard or mouse, or the flux of a magnetic drive or flash drive etc.

The 1s and 0s of which you speak are human abstractions, observed when other combinations of electrical signals are organized to manipulate pixels and bubble jets to represent the state of the original electrical signals. Early computers had switches and lamps.

[ammarr]

thanks arizonace

while searching about the same issue, i came across this similar course by imperial collage and all the content is available free online
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dfg/hardware/hardware.html

in handout 5 (Physical Realisation of Logic Gates)

its mentioned that boolean states can be defined as Voltage (e.g. ~3.5v for one and ~0.5v for zero)

i went also into reading about how memory works and how reading and writing works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory

i only wanted to understand the relation between the hardware and software worlds, but the more i read i see that its taking me into areas am not very much interested in

EPROM & Floating-gate MOSFET gave me a simple understanding of whats going on down there and i guess that's enough.

I will stick to what Shimon Schocken said "God gave us Nand"

[Mike Leamy]

If you think of using relays to make the Nand God gate, then it isn't hard to go from an electrical plug in the wall providing positive voltage (and ground, zero voltage) to all of your chips. I like these applets:

http://tams-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/applets/hades/webdemos/05-switched/20-relays/and-nand.html