Question

What are exception and interrupt? What are floating point numbers? And what is float point overflow and float point underflow? What are clocking methodology and edge-triggered clocking? What is control signal? And what we mean by saying that a signal is asserted? What is datapath element? List at least five datapath elements in the MIPS implementation.

Answer 1

1. Interrupts are utilized to handle external procedures like serial ports, keyboards and exceptions are utilized to switch instruction faults, like division by zero, undefined opcode.

2. The term floating point is resulting from the information that there is no fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point; namely, the decimal point can float. There are also symbols in which the number of digits before and after the decimal point is set, named fixed-point representations.

Overflow: The exponent is too big to be denoted in the Exponent field

Underflow: The number is too small to be denoted in the Exponent field