UP ONE LEVEL:
ENEL 369 Winter 2001 Home Page
ENEL 369 Winter 2001 Midterm Information
Author: Steve Norman
Last modified: Wed Feb 21 17:13:31 MST 2001
Contents
Test Time and Location
The test is from 6:30pm to 8:00pm on Friday, March 2.
Note that the duration is 1.5 hours, not two hours.
The location of the test is MFH 162.
Please take some time to find this room before
the evening of the test.
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Closed-book, no calculators
The test is closed-book--do not not take any books or notes
to your seat.
Use of calculators or computers during the test is
not permitted.
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Test Topics
First, let me state a general principle:
The test will focus mainly on topics that were
heavily emphasized in lectures and labs.
I am not going to make a lot of marks depend on
topics that were given very little coverage in lectures and labs.
The test will cover all material up to and including Lab 6 and
the lecture of Wednesday, February 28, with the following exceptions:
- You will not have to answer questions about how
to use xspim.
- You will not have to determine bit patterns for
instructions, or determine what instructions correspond
to a given bit patterns.
Coverage of floating-point numbers will be light--you will have only
had a few days to think about floating-point by the day of the test,
so I don't think it's fair to have very many marks associated with
that topic.
There may be a small number of marks associated
with material in the assigned reading from Chapters 3 and 4
that was not covered in lectures.
Let me repeat that the number of marks related to this
material will be either zero or very small.
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Test Format
The test will consist of many short questions.
Questions will be of the following types:
- You will have to write SPIM procedures or other short sequences
of SPIM instructions.
You may be asked to translate C functions.
You may also be asked to write code to perform a
specified task without having any C code to work from.
When writing code, you must use only the instructions
and pseudoinstructions listed in the
section below called ``Midterm Instruction Subset''.
- You will have to draw diagrams and/or
predict register and memory contents to show that you know how a
given SPIM program works.
- You will have to write some short paragraphs
(roughly two or three sentences) to show that you
understand key terms and concepts from the course.
You will write all of your answers on the question paper,
in spaces provided for answers.
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Midterm Instruction Subset
In order to avoid having you spend a lot of time
memorizing all of the instructions you have seen
so far in the course, all problems
that ask you to read or write SPIM code will be set up
so that you can solve them with knowledge of
the following MIPS instructions:
add, addi, addu, addiu,
sub, subu,
and, andi,
or, ori,
sll, srl,
lui,
lw, sw, lb, lbu, sb,
beq, bne,
j, jal, jr,
slt, slti, sltu, sltiu,
mult, multu, mfhi, mflo
In addition, you need to understand exactly two pseudoinstructions:
la, li
Reference Material
You will be provided with one or two pages of reference material
along with the question paper.
This material will include:
- A list of all 32 general purpose registers in a MIPS processor.
- Documentation for all of the instructions in the ``Midterm
Instruction Subset'' listed above.
Here are some examples of the documentation:
- addu rdest, rsrc1, rsrc2
Add words from registers rsrc1 and rsrc2
and put result in register rdest.
- lb rdest, address
Copy byte at memory address address to bits 7-0
of register rdest, and make bits 31-8 of
rdest equal to bit 7 of that byte.
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Suggestions for preparation
Here are suggestions for review:
- Re-read the assigned sections from the textbook.
(Unlike ENEL 339, ENEL 369 follows the course text closely.)
Pay particularly close attention to material that
got heavy coverage in lectures and/or labs.
- Review lecture notes and lab handouts carefully.
Many of the `Read This First' sections in lab handouts
contain useful information.
- Re-do lab exercises using pencil and paper,
especially those exercises that you found difficult
when you first did them.
Practice writing complete procedure definitions with
pencil and paper--writing code by hand is a bit different
from typing code in a text editor, and it's obviously
an important skill to develop for tests and exams.
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