Book Image

Modern Computer Architecture and Organization

By : Jim Ledin
Book Image

Modern Computer Architecture and Organization

By: Jim Ledin

Overview of this book

Are you a software developer, systems designer, or computer architecture student looking for a methodical introduction to digital device architectures but overwhelmed by their complexity? This book will help you to learn how modern computer systems work, from the lowest level of transistor switching to the macro view of collaborating multiprocessor servers. You'll gain unique insights into the internal behavior of processors that execute the code developed in high-level languages and enable you to design more efficient and scalable software systems. The book will teach you the fundamentals of computer systems including transistors, logic gates, sequential logic, and instruction operations. You will learn details of modern processor architectures and instruction sets including x86, x64, ARM, and RISC-V. You will see how to implement a RISC-V processor in a low-cost FPGA board and how to write a quantum computing program and run it on an actual quantum computer. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of modern processor and computer architectures and the future directions these architectures are likely to take.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals of Computer Architecture
8
Section 2: Processor Architectures and Instruction Sets
14
Section 3: Applications of Computer Architecture

Introducing the MOSFET

Chapter 2, Digital Logic, introduced the NPN transistor, a type of bipolar junction transistor (BJT). The NPN transistor is called bipolar because it relies on both positive and negative charge carriers to function.

In semiconductors, electrons serve as the negative charge carriers. There are no physical particles with positive charge involved in a semiconductor operation; rather, the absence of a normally present electron in an atom exhibits the same properties as a positively charged particle. These missing electrons are referred to as holes. Holes function as the positive charge carriers in bipolar junction transistors.

The concept of holes is so fundamental to semiconductor operation that William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, wrote a book entitled Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, published in 1950. We'll next examine the behavior of positive and negative charge carriers in unipolar transistors.

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