Essential Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Computers

We said that logical gates can do any kind of mathematical operation. A processor is a block of logic gates, registers, and control logic. The processor can perform complex operations—add, subtract, multiply, divide, compare, etc. Each operation is controlled by an instruction. The processor is often called a central processing unit (CPU).

A computer is a combination of a processor, memory, and instructions stored in the memory. The computer executes a sequence of instructions to perform a useful task. Each instruction is relatively small and simple, but can be executed very rapidly.

Some computers have many different processor and memory ICs mounted on PC boards. Other computers can fit on a single IC chip and are called microprocessors ...