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Final Exam Instructions

The exam is closed book, closed notes, no calculators, no laptop, no cellphone, no electronics, and is to be completed independently during the 150 minute exam period. There will be no makeup exam unless you contact me prior to the exam date with a documented excused absence.

Bring an eraser and pencil. Pen is OK, but you may want to take advantage of an eraser. I will provide scrap paper if necessary.

You may bring a single letter-size paper sheet of handwritten notes (both sides). I suggest keeping your notes brief, and continue to study vigorously for the exam. You will not have enough time to complete the exam if you rely too heavily on your handwritten notes.

If you need an accomodation such as extended time on the exam, this must be established with the Academic Resource Center first. Students taking exams at the Academic Resource Center need to submit their test request to the ARC two business days prior to the scheduled exam.

Topics include everything covered since the beginning of the semester, such as:

• Number representation
  • Converting among binary, hexadecimal, and decimal
  • Signed magnitude
  • One’s complement
  • Two’s complement
  • Excess notation
• IEEE floating point
  • Converting among binary, hexadecimal, and decimal
  • Inexact representations
• Bitwise operations
  • &, |, ^
  • Bit shifting
• Hardware
  • Buses
  • CPU
  • Memory
    • Registers, cache, main memory, secondary memory
    • Addressing
    • Byte ordering
    • Error detection, hamming distance, error correction via parity bits
• Digital Logic
  • Gates
  • Boolean algebra
  • Integrated ciruits (e.g., adder, multiplexer, demultiplexer, decoder)
  • Clocks
  • Memory (latches / flip-flops)
• Microarchitecture
  • registers
  • (micro) instructions
  • data path (including ALU) & control store
  • ALU
  • Relation between IJVM and Mic-1
• Instruction set architecture
  • registers
  • instructions
  • memory alignment
  • function calls
    • leaf vs non-leaf functions
    • stack
  • MIPS
• Operating system machine level
  • OS
  • Memory, virtual memory
    • paging, page table, page replacement policies (optimal, FIFO, LRU)
    • segmentation
  • Process
  • Files and file systems
  • POSIX, terminal commands (cd, cat, ls, export, pwd)
  • Parallelism
    • creating a process (fork())
    • race condition and prevention (semaphores, critical section)

Questions may be of the following form:

• Work out some problem and show your work (e.g., convert binary to decimal, use a truth table to determine whether the following boolean functions are equivalent, construct a circuit for a given function, illustrate a page table over time using a particular page replacement policy, etc.)
• Short answer (e.g., explain, define)
• Multiple choice / true false
• Matching (definitions)

You may be asked to:

• interpret and draw circuit diagrams
• read and modify MIPS assembly code, IJVM code, C code

Instructions for Exam 1 & Exam 2

The exam is closed book, closed notes, no calculators, no laptop, no cellphone, no electronics, and is to be completed independently during the 50 minute class period. There will be no makeup exam unless you contact me prior to the exam date with a documented excused absence.

Bring an eraser and pencil. Pen is OK, but you may want to take advantage of an eraser. I will provide scrap paper if necessary.

You may bring a single letter-size paper sheet of one-sided handwritten notes. I suggest you write sparingly on the single side of the notes that you may use, and continue to study vigorously for the exam. You will not have enough time to complete the exam if you rely too heavily on your single sided sheet of handwritten notes.

If you need an accomodation such as extended time on the exam, this must be established with the Academic Resource Center first. Students taking exams at the Academic Resource Center need to submit their test request to the ARC two business days prior to the scheduled exam.

Exam 1 Topics

Topics include presentation slides and assigned reading from appendix, chapter 1, and chapter 2.

• Number representation
  • Converting among binary, hexadecimal, and decimal
  • Signed magnitude
  • One’s complement
  • Two’s complement
  • Excess notation
• IEEE floating point
  • Converting among binary, hexadecimal, and decimal
  • Inexact representations
• Bitwise operations
  • &, |, ^
  • Bit shifting
• Hardware
  • Buses
  • CPU
  • Memory
    • Registers, cache, main memory, secondary memory
    • Addressing
    • Byte ordering
    • Error detection, hamming distance, error correction via parity bits

Questions may be of the following form:

• Work out some problem and show your work (e.g., convert binary to decimal)
• Short answer (e.g., explain, define)
• Multiple choice

Exam 2 Topics

Topics include presentation slides and assigned reading from chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, and MIPs notes/references.

• Digital Logic
  • Gates
  • Boolean algebra
  • Integrated ciruits (e.g., adder, multiplexer, demultiplexer, decoder)
  • Clocks
  • Memory (latches / flip-flops)
• Microarchitecture
  • registers
  • (micro) instructions
  • data path (including ALU) & control store
  • ALU
  • Relation between IJVM and Mic-1
• Instruction set architecture
  • registers
  • instructions
  • memory alignment
  • function calls
    • leaf vs non-leaf functions
    • stack
  • MIPS

Questions may be of the following form:

• Work out some problem and show your work (e.g., use a truth table to determine whether the following boolean functions are equivalent, construct a circuit for a given function, etc. )
• Short answer (e.g., explain, define)
• Multiple choice

You may be asked to:

• interpret and draw circuit diagrams
• read and modify MIPS assembly code