Addressing Modes

  • Implied – the data value/data address is implicitly associated with the instruction.
  • Register – references the data in a register or in a register pair.
  • Immediate – the data is provided in the instruction.
  • Direct – the instruction operand specifies the memory address where data is located.
  • Register indirect – instruction specifies a register containing an address, where data is located. This addressing mode works with SI, DI, BX and BP registers.
  • Based :- 8-bit or 16-bit instruction operand is added to the contents of a base register (BX or BP), the resulting value is a pointer to location where data resides.
  • Indexed:- 8-bit or 16-bit instruction operand is added to the contents of an index register (SI or DI), the resulting value is a pointer to location where data resides
  • Based Indexed: – the contents of a base register (BX or BP) is added to the contents of an index register (SI or DI), the resulting value is a pointer to location where data resides.
  • Based Indexed with displacement:- 8-bit or 16-bit instruction operand is added to the contents of a base register (BX or BP) and index register (SI or DI), the resulting value is a pointer to location where data resides.

 

Memory

Program, data and stack memories occupy the same memory space. As the most of the processor instructions use 16-bit pointers the processor can effectively address only 64 KB of memory.

 

To access memory outside of 64 KB the CPU uses special segment registers to specify where the code, stack and data 64 KB segments are positioned within 1 MB of memory (see the “Registers” section below).16-bit pointers and data are stored as: address: low-order byte address+1: high-order byte

 

1. Program memory – program can be located anywhere in memory. Jump and call instructions can be used for short jumps within currently selected 64 KB code segment, as well as for far jumps anywhere within 1 MB of memory.

All conditional jump instructions can be used to jump within approximately +127 to – 127 bytes from current instruction.

 

2. Data memory – the processor can access data in any one out of 4 available segments, which limits the size of accessible memory to 256 KB (if all four segments point to different 64 KB blocks).

 

Accessing data from the Data, Code, Stack or Extra segments can be usually done by prefixing instructions with the DS:, CS:, SS: or ES: (some registers and instructions by default may use the ES or SS segments instead of DS segment).

 

Word data can be located at odd or even byte boundaries. The processor uses two memory accesses to read 16-bit word located at odd byte boundaries. Reading word data from even byte boundaries requires only one memory access.

 

3. Stack memory can be placed anywhere in memory. The stack can be located at odd memory addresses, but it is not recommended for performance reasons (see “Data Memory” above).

 

Reserved locations:

  • 0000h – 03FFh are reserved for interrupt vectors. Each interrupt vector is a 32-bit pointer in format segment: offset.
  • FFFF0h – FFFFFh – after RESET the processor always starts program execution at the FFFF0h address.

 

Interrupts

The processor has the following interrupts:

 

INTR is a maskable hardware interrupt. The interrupt can be enabled/disabled using STI/CLI instructions or using more complicated method of updating the FLAGS register with the help of the POPF instruction.

When an interrupt occurs, the processor stores FLAGS register into stack, disables further interrupts, fetches from the bus one byte representing interrupt type, and jumps to interrupt processing routine address of which is stored in location 4 * <interrupt type>. Interrupt processing routine should return with the IRET instruction.

 

NMI is a non-maskable interrupt. Interrupt is processed in the same way as the INTR interrupt. Interrupt type of the NMI is 2, i.e. the address of the NMI processing routine is stored in location 0008h. This interrupt has higher priority then the maskable interrupt.

 

Software interrupts can be caused by:

  • INT instruction – breakpoint interrupt. This is a type 3 interrupt.
  • INT <interrupt number> instruction – any one interrupt from available 256 interrupts.
  • INTO instruction – interrupt on overflow
  • Single-step interrupt – generated if the TF flag is set. This is a type 1 interrupt. When the CPU processes this interrupt it clears TF flag before calling the interrupt processing routine.

 

Processor exceptions: Divide Error (Type 0), Unused Opcode (type 6) and Escape opcode (type 7).Software interrupt processing is the same as for the hardware interrupts.

 
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