ECE 2035: Programming for Hardware/Software Systems

This course presents execution and storage mechanisms used to support high level programming languages and operating systems. This design-oriented course describes how complex mechanisms are created using operations and storage defined in an instruction set architecture. Assembly language examples illustrate key course concepts. Lecture material is reinforced by design projects that require C programming and MIPS assembly language programming, focusing on performance and storage resource requirements on hardware platforms.

Objectives:

• Understand how execution and storage constructs in high-level programming languages and operating systems are implemented on a hardware platform.
• Learn design principles for sequential, procedural programming, the C programming language and MIPS assembly language, and the use of common tools for software development and performance evaluation.
• Build experience in systems-oriented design, focusing on performance and storage requirements of the target application and hardware platform.

Course Outcomes: Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Develop a software design using appropriate data and procedural abstractions given an engineering problem specification
• Implement high-level programming language storage, control, and procedural constructs in the assembly language of a hardware platform.
• Use commonly available tools for software development, system management, debugging, performance monitoring, and optimization.
• Develop a software system that uses multiple files and libraries.
• Develop, test, and deploy reliable software using appropriate operating system capabilities (e.g., file and directory access, I/O interface).

Course Outline

• Introduction to High Level Language and Assembly Programming
  • Introduction to high level programming language syntax: C
  • Introduction to assembly programming: MIPS
  • Introduction to operating systems: Linux
  • Basic compilation and simulation tools for C and MIPS

• Processing
  • Instruction Set Architecture datapath
  • Controller
  • Basic mathematical/logical expressions

• Control
  • Conditionals (if-then-else)
  • Iteration (while, for, do)
  • Simple array (1D vector) access
  • Basic function calling
  • Nonlocal control flow (continue, break, return)

• Software performance & reliability
  • testing
  • debugging
  • performance monitoring and optimization

• Supporting Data Abstraction
  • Storage: static, stack, heap (basic characteristics of each)
  • Basic data types
  • Variables and type declarations
  • Arrays
  • Pointers
  • User-defined structures (structs)
  • Multidimensional static arrays
  • Word alignment

• Supporting Procedural Abstraction
  • Motivate need for stack memory
  • Nested functions
  • Recursion
  • Procedure calling: call/return procedure linkage
  • Stack activation frames
  • Parameter typing and passing (call by value/reference)
  • Function pointers

• Heap Management
  • Dynamic allocation (on stack vs. on heap)
  • Manual management (malloc/free)
  • Common memory errors (dangling pointers and memmory leaks)

• Data Structures
  • Linked lists
  • Hash tables
  • Performance

• Embedded Systems
  • Interaction with execution platform
  • Efficiency: performance, storage, energy
  • Mbed microcontroller, ARM programming resources

• Compilation
  • compilation overview
  • linking, loading, libraries
  • optimization
• Optional Advanced Topics
  • Automatic storage reclamation (garbage collection)
  • Concurrency
    • types of parallelism
    • data-level parallelism
    • multicore systems
    • support for atomicity
  • File systems and I/O
  • Exception and Interrupt Handlers
  • Energy efficiency
  • Security issues