EE 360N, Spring 2001
Y. N. Patt, Instructor
Kameswar Subramaniam, Onur Mutlu, TAs
Lab Assignment 1; Due February 4, 11.59pm.
 

The purpose of this lab is to reinforce the concepts of assembly language and assemblers. In this lab assignment, you will write a program to solve a problem in the LC-2 Assembly Language. You will also write an LC-2 Assembler, whose job will be to translate assembly language source code into the machine language (ISA) of the LC-2. In Lab Assignment 2, we will close the loop by having you a) complete the design of a simulator for the LC-2, and b) test your assember by having the simulator execute the program you wrote and assembled in this lab.

Part I: Write an assembler for the LC-2 Assembly Language

The general format of a line of assembly code which will be the input to your assembler is as follows:

label opcode operands ;comments

The opcode field can be any one of the following instructions:

ADD, AND, BR, JSR, JSRR, LD, LDI, LDR, LEA, NOP, NOT, RET, ST, STI, STR, TRAP

Optionally, an instruction can be commented -- which is good style if the comment contains meaningful information. Comments follow the semicolon and are not interpreted by the Assembler. Note that the semicolon prefaces the comment, and a newline ends the comment. Other delimiters should not be used.

In this lab assignment, you can assume that the RTI opcode does not exist and that a NOP instruction translates into the machine language instruction 0x8000.

In addition to LC-2 instructions, an assembly language also contains pseudo-ops, (sometimes called macro directives). These are messages from the programmer to the assembler that assist the assembler in performing the translation process. In the case of our LC-2 Assembly Language, we will only require three pseudo-ops to make our lives easier: .ORIG, .END, and .FILL.

An assembly language program will consist of some number of assembly language instructions, delimited by .ORIG and .END. The pseudo-op .END is a message to the assembler designating the end of the assembly language source program. The .ORIG pseudo-op provides two functions: it designates the start of the source program, and it specifies the location of the first instruction in the object module to be produced.

For example, .ORIG n means "the next instruction will be assigned to location n."

The pseudo-op .FILL n assigns the value n to the corresponding location in the object module.

The task of the assembler is that of line-by-line translation. The input is an assembly language file, and the output is an ISA file (consisting of hexadecimal digits). To make it a little more concrete, here is a sample assembly language program:

        .ORIG x3000       ;This program counts from 10 to 0
        LD R1, TEN
START   ADD R1, R1, #-1
        BRZ DONE
        JMP START
                          ;blank line
DONE    TRAP x25          ;The last executable instruction
TEN     .FILL x000A       ;This is 10 in 2's comp, hexadecimal
        .END              ;The pseudo-op, delimiting the source program

and its corresponding ISA program:

0x3000
0x2205
0x127F
0x0404
0x4001
0xF025
0x000A

When this program is loaded into the simulator, the instruction 0x2205 will be loaded into memory location specified by the first line of the program which is 0x3000. Thus, memory locations 0x3000 to 0x3005 will contain the program.

We have included below another example of an assembly language program, and the result of the assembly process. In this case, we assume that the .ORIG pseudo-op allows assembly to start at arbritrary memory addresses (e.g., 256).

        .ORIG #256
A       LDI R1, Y
        ADD R1, R1, R1
        ADD R1, R1, x-10  ;x-10 is the negative of x10
        BRN A
        HALT
Y       .FILL #263
        .FILL #13
        .FILL #6
        .END

would be assembled into the following:

0x0100
0xA305
0x1241
0x1270
0x0900
0xF025
0x0107
0x000D
0x0006

Next, the Assembly Process, itself,

Your assembler should make two passes of the input file. In the first pass, all the labels should be bound to specific memory addresses. You create a symbol table to contain those bindings. Whenever a new instruction label is encountered in the input file, it is assigned to the current memory address.

The second pass performs the translation from assembly language to machine language, one line at a time. It is during this pass that the output file should be generated.

You should write your program to take two command-line arguments. The first argument is the name of a file that contains a program written in LC-2 assembly language, which will be the input to your program. The second argument is the name of the file to which your program will write its output. In other words, this is the name of the file which will contain the LC-2 machine code corresponding to the input assembly language file. For example, we should be able to run your assembler with the following command-line input

where assemble is the name of the executable file corresponding to your compiled and linked program (you can name the executable of your program as you like, see the gcc help page for more detail) <source.asm> is the input assembly language file, and <output.obj> is the output file that will contain the assembled code.

You will need to include some basic error checking within your assembler to handle improperly constructed assembly language programs. Your assembler must detect three types of errors and must return three types of error codes. The errors to be detected are undefined labels (error code 1), invalid instructions (error code 2), and invalid constants (error code 3). An invalid constant is a constant that is too large to be assembled into an LC-2 instruction. If the .ORIG pseudo-op contains an address that is greater than an address that can be represented in the 16-bit address space, your program should return error code 3. Your program must return the error codes via the exit(n) function. If the assembly language program does not contain any errors, you must exit with error code 0.

This error checking is the bare minimum that we expect. You can return error code 4 for any other errors you find. Just be sure that the errors don't fall within the first three categories specified above.

Part II: Write a program to solve the following problem

Write a program in the LC-2 assembly language that counts the number of 1s in the bit pattern stored at memory location x4000 and stores this number in memory location x4001. For example, if, right before the execution of the program, memory location x4000 contains 0001001101110000, then, after the execution of the program, the result stored in memory location x4001 should be 0000000000000110. Your assembly program must begin at memory location x3000. You will have no way of determining whether your assembly language code works [yet!], but you can use it to determine whether your assembler works!

Requirements of this lab assignment:

Important Note: Because we will be evaluating your code in unix, please be sure your code compiles with gcc. This means that you need to write your code in C code that obeys the ANSI standard.

To complete Lab Assignment 1, you will need to turn in the following:

1. An adequately documented listing of your LC-2 Assembler.

2. A source listing (LC-2 Assembly Language) of the "1-counting" program described above.

3. The ISA (machine language) listing of the shift program, as output by the assembler.

4. You will also submit your code electronically. More details on this will be given later.

Things to watch for:

Be sure that your assembler can handle comments on any line, including lines that contain psuedo-ops and lines that contain only comments. Be careful with comments that follow a HALT or RET instruction -- these instructions take no operand.

Your assembler should allow hexadecimal and decimal constants after both ISA instructions, like ADD, and after .FILL pseudo-ops.