DCO

IT604 | CS-204

Why DCO?

According to "ACM-2013 report" this is system fundamental knowledge area, which is essential for the following:

To Develop a deeper understanding of the hardware environment upon which all computing is based
To understand the interface it provides to higher software layers.
To acquire an understanding and appreciation of a computer system’s functional components, their characteristics, performance and interactions
To be ready to accept the challenge of exploiting parallelism ,to sustain performance improvements now and into the future

Course Objective

In selecting a system to use, students should be able to understand the tradeoff among various components, such as CPU clock speed, cycles per instruction, memory size, and average memory access time.Students must be capable to develop programs that can achieve high performance through a programmer’s awareness of parallelism and latency.

DCO - Test

Prepare MCQ question of computer Organisation by William J. Timothi
Online Test April 2026

DCO Assignment

1. With the help of diagram explain the different functional units of a Computer?

2. What are the main four components of any general purpose computer? Describe briefly.

3. Describe in brief the different generations of computer. Describe the characteristics of various generations of computer?

4. Explain the use of following registers: PC, MAR, IR, MDR, SP

5. What are the different performance measures used to represent a computer system’s performance?

6. Explain Big-endian and Little-endian byte-addresses assignment with example.

7. Define and draw the logic diagram of n-bit ripple-carry adder.

8. Explain the process called subroutine nesting?

9. Represent (-23) in :

(i)Sign-and-magnitude representation

(ii)1’s complement representation

(iii) 2’s complement representation

10. Briefly discuss IEEE Standard Floating-point representation? Create the 32-bit single-precision IEEE standard representation of the decimal number –(0.625).

11. Draw a flow chart to explain how addition and subtraction of two fixed point numbers can be done. Give an example to explain it.

12. What are differences among positive overflow, exponent overflow and significant overflow? Explain using suitable example.

13. Multiply the following pairs of signed 2’s-complement numbers using:(i)Booth algorithm(ii)Bit-pairing of the multiplier A = 010111 and B = 110110. Assume A is the multiplicand and B is the multiplier.

14. Discuss any two IEEE standard floating point formats. Explain Add/Subtract and multiply rules on floating point numbers.

15. Perform signed multiplication of -3 and 7 using booth multiplication algorithm. Represent the numbers in 5 bits including sign bit. Give booth multiplier recording table that is used in the multiplication.

16. What are the commonly flags used by the processor to keep track the information about the results of various operations?

17. Write and explain non-restoring division algorithm using a suitable example.

18. Explain tow techniques for speeding up the multiplication operation.

19. Explain the need of memory hierarchy with the help of a block diagram? What is the reason for not having one large memory unit for storing all information at one place?

20. Explain briefly SRAM and DRAM. Mention the differences between these.

21. Why RAM traditionally have been organized as only one bit per chip where as ROM are organized with multiple chips per bit?

22. Give the organization of a 2M X 32 memory module using 512K X 8 memory chips. Explain the organization.

23. How many 128 × 8 RAM chips are needed to provide a memory capacity of 2048 bytes?

24. How many lines of the address bus must be used to access 2048 bytes of memory? How many of these lines will be common to all chips?

25. How many lines must be decoded for chip select? Specify the size of the decoder?

26. A digital computer has a memory unit of 64K × 16 and a cache memory of 1K words. The cache uses direct mapping with a block size of four words.(i) How many bits are there in the tag, index, block and words fields of the address format?(ii) How many bits are there in each word of cache, and how are they divided into functions? Include a valid bit.(iii) How many blocks can the cache accommodate?

27. What do you mean by Memory – interleaving?

28. The memory unit of a computer has 256K words of 32 bits each. The computer has an instruction format with four fields: an operation code field, a mode field to specify one of the seven addressing modes, a register address field to specify one of 60 processor registers, and a memory address. Specify the instruction format and number of bits in each field if the instruction is in one word memory.

29. Consider a memory consisting of 64K words of 8 bits each. Give the organization to implement this memory using 16K X 1 static memory chips.

30. A certain magnetic disk has the following specification:•Number of recording = 10•Number of tracks/surface = 256 •Number of sectors/track = 32 •Number of bytes/sector = 128•Disk rotation speed = 2400 rpm Calculate the following:(i) Disk capacity [formula: Disk capacity = Number of surfaces × Number of tracks in each surface × Number of sectors in a track × Number of bytes in a sector. ] (ii)Transfer Rate (iii) Latency Time

31. Why page-table is required in a virtual memory system. Explain different ways of organizing a page table.

32. Write short notes on DVD Technology?

33. Explain the purpose of Disk controller?

34. Design a half adder as a 2 level AND OR circuit? Implement full adder circuit using two half adders

35. What are the different kinds of I/O communication techniques? Compare and contrast. In the above techniques, which is the most efficient? Justify your answer.

36. What is the disadvantage of transferring data through strobe control method? How handshaking overcomes this disadvantage? Explain.

37. Bring out the four key differences between subroutine and interrupt service routine.

38. Define addressing mode. With the help of example explain different addressing.

39. A two word instruction is stored in memory at an address designated by symbol W.The address field of the instruction (stored at W + 1) is designated by the symbol Y. The operand used during the execution of the instruction is stored at an address symbolized by Z. An index register contains the value X. State how Z is calculated from the other addresses if the addressing mode of the instruction is(i)Direct(ii)Indirect(iii) Relative(iv) Indexed

40. Explain the following addressing modes with examples:

(i)Immediate mode

(ii)Relative mode

(iii)Auto increment

41. Explain stack organization used in processors. Differentiate between a register stack and a memory stack.

42. Consider the following instruction ← [A] + [B]. Explain the two-phase execution procedure of the statement?

43. Write the actions required to execute the instructions Move (R1), R2?

44. Consider the statement ADD (R2), R1.(i) Write the steps required for execution of above instruction?(ii) Write the sequence of control steps required to perform the execution of above instruction for single bus architecture?

45. Consider the following instructions: Add (R3), R1. What sequence of elementary operations is required to execute this instruction? Explain.

46. What do you mean by Bus Arbitration? Discuss two approaches to bus arbitration: Centralized and Distributed.

47. Briefly describe the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Bus Standards?

48. Explain in brief with the help of a diagram the working of daisy chain. Briefly describe the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Bus Standards? Considering with multiple priority levels and multiple devices in each level.

49. What are the main advantages of using Input / Output interface? Why interfacing is used in digital computers?

50. Summarize the sequence of events involved in handling an interrupt request from a single device.

51. Define and explain the following (1)Interrupt(2)Vectored Interrupt(3)Interrupt nesting(4)An exception and its two examples.

52. Define exception? Explain the different kinds of exceptions.

53. With the help of figure, explain multiple-bus organization?

54. Explain time-shared common bus organization.

55. What is I/O interface and port? Write functions of an I/O interface.

56. Draw the block diagram of universal bus (USB) structure connected to the host computer. Briefly explain all fields of packets that are used for communication between a host and a device connected to an USB port.

57. Draw and explain USB packet formats and frames.

58. Explain how USB support Isochronous data?

59. Describe the main phases involved in the operation of the SCSI bus.

60. Differentiate between Hard-wired controlled and Micro programmed controlled micro-instructions.

61. Hard-wired control unit is faster than micro programmed control unit. Justify this statement.

62. Explain the variety of techniques available for sequencing of micro instructions based on the format of the address information in the micro-instruction.

63. Compare and contrast between horizontal and vertical approach of micro-instruction?

64. With the help of block diagram, describe the complete processor?

Reference

DCO Syllabus- Hint- Material- Sample Ans - Test2