Simulating Computer Arithmetic Hardware

CPSC 5700 - Advanced Computer Architecture - Spring 2015

Assignment 3 - Simulating Computer Arithmetic Hardware

The purpose of this assignment is to gain a better understanding of the operation of computer arithmetic circuits by constructing working models using a publicly available logic simulator. We will explore circuits that perform basic arithmetic operations on integer and floating-point numbers.

The logic simulator I am asking you to use in carrying out this assignment is Logisim, written by Carl Burch. It can run on any computer with a Java Virtual Machine installed. The latest Windows version can be downloaded here. The program may be run directly without any complex installation or uninstallation process. I recommend that you first familiarize yourself with its operation by building some small combinational and sequential logic circuits before proceeding to the following assignment.

Assignment (Due Wednesday, March 4 by 5:00 p.m.):

Part A: Construct a circuit that will multiply two 8-bit signed binary integers in two's complement format, producing a 16-bit signed result. For this part of the assignment you may use any of the basic logic gates, multiplexers, flip-flops, registers, etc. available in Logisim or its standard libraries, but you may not use the multiplier from the Arithmetic library. Using a ROM from the Memory library is also not allowed. (Pre-computing results and storing them in a lookup table for later access is a legitimate design technique in some situations, but it would bypass the main point of this assignment, which is to understand the inner workings of arithmetic circuits.) Your multiplier may use all combinational logic, or a mix of combinational and sequential logic. When you have a completed implementation, test it by providing several pairs of numbers as inputs. Make sure you thoroughly exercise the circuit by using all combinations of positive and negative operands, both large and small numbers as operands (including positive and negative boundary cases), one or both operands equal to zero, etc. (This way there will be no surprises when I test your submitted circuit on my own machine.)

Part B: Now construct a circuit that will multiply a pair of numbers in IEEE-754 single precision floating-point format. This time, it is OK to use the built-in integer multiplier function from Logisim's Arithmetic library to do the actual multiplication of the significands; but you will still need to figure out and build in the logic to un-bias, add, and re-bias exponents as needed, normalize the product and adjust the exponent, etc. to produce the final result in IEEE-754 format. As in Part A, once you have your floating-point multiplier circuit constructed, test it with a variety of positive and negative, small (much less than 1) and large numbers, and zero, as inputs. (To keep things more manageable, you do not have to make the circuit handle NaNs, denormalized numbers, or positive/negative infinity; it only has to work for normalized real numbers and positive/negative zero.)

To Turn In: Each student must submit a report (in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format) including a thorough description of each circuit and at least a top-level circuit diagram. More detailed diagrams of lower-level circuit components are encouraged if they help to explain the circuits' operation. Also include tables of the test data you used to evaluate each circuit and the results obtained in each case. Analyze and discuss your results, noting anything unusual or unexpected about the design or operation of the circuits. (If you had the assignment to do over again, would you have done anything differently? Were there any ways you could have made your circuit[s] perform better or more efficiently?) Each student must also submit all Logisim project (.circ) files comprising each circuit. This will allow me to verify the operation of your circuits on my own machine. Good luck and have fun!

Electrical Engineering Electronics Microcontroller Software Architecture

Project ID: #7233953

About the project