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Assembly Language Programming
1. Assembly Language Programming: An Introduction
An assembler is a program that converts an assembly language application program to a binary
machine language program (e.g., opcode and operands bytes in the MPS430’s memory).
Similarly, a compiler is a program that converts an application program written in C or C++ into
an intermediate file called an object file.
Modern software engineering encompasses many steps, such as requirement analysis, user
interface design, software design, software implementation (programming), software testing,
tuning, and optimization. Here we will focus on assembly language software development
illustrated in Figure 1.
The first step in the process is to develop assembly program text. Assemblers typically provide
assembly text editors to help program development. At assemble time , the input text is passed to
the assembler, which parses the text, emitting a program listing and possibly error reports. If
there are no errors, the assembler produces a binary machine language module. The module
must contain information about where the program or module is to be loaded in memory, and if it
contains the starting address of the program, this start symbol must be made known. If the
module has to be linked with other modules, then it must include this additional linkage
information. This means that all labels in the module that have to be visible to other modules
must be specified as public symbols. Similarly, all labels that are defined in other modules must
be specified as external symbols.
At link time , the linker combines separately assembled modules into a single load module. The
linker will also add any initialization or finalization code to allow the operating system to start
the program or return control to the OS, once the program has completed.
At load time , the program loader copies the program into computer’s main memory.
At run-time , the program execution begins.
Assembler
Assembly language
program text (*.s43)
Machine code module
(binary)
Program listing
Error reports
Linker
Loader
Load Module
Other machine
codes
Memory CPU
Figure 1. Program development flow using assembly language programming.
2. What do assemblers do?
Assemblers typically provide the following capabilities.
- Allow programmers to access and use all ISA components (instructions, registers, memory)
- A means for specifying run-time location of program and data in memory
- Provide symbolic labels for the representation of constants and addresses
- Perform compile-time arithmetic
- Provide the use of any synthetic instructions
- Expand programmer-defined macro routines
- Emit machine code in a form that can be loaded and executed
- Report syntax errors and generate program listings
- Provide an interface to the module linkers and program loader. 3. Assembly Programs
Assembly Language Syntax
Each assembler has its own unique syntactical structure (use of uppercase or lowercase, label
definitions, token separators, etc). In spite of this, all assemblers share some common features.
- Program : Counts the number of characters E in a string
- Input : The input string is the myStr
- Output : The port one displays the number of E's in the string
- Written by : A. Milenkovic
- Date : August 14, 2008
- Description: MSP430 IAR EW; Demonstration of the MSP430 assembler ---------------------------------------------------------------------/
#include "msp430.h" ; #define controlled include file
ORG 0FF00h myStr: DB "HELLO WORLD, I AM THE MSP430!" ; the string is placed on the stack ; the null character is automatically added after the '!'
NAME main ; module name
PUBLIC main ; make the main label visible ; outside this module ORG 0FFFEh DC16 init ; set reset vector to 'init' label
RSEG CSTACK ; pre-declaration of segment RSEG CODE ; place program in 'CODE' segment
init: MOV #SFE(CSTACK), SP ; set up stack
main: NOP ; main program MOV.W #WDTPW+WDTHOLD,&WDTCTL ; Stop watchdog timer BIS.B #0FFh,&P1DIR ; configure P1.x output MOV.W #myStr, R4 ; load the starting address of the string into the register R CLR.B R5 ; register R5 will serve as a counter gnext: MOV.B @R4+, R6 ; get a new character CMP #0,R JEQ lend ; go to the end CMP.B #'E',R JNE gnext INC R5 ; increment counter JMP gnext
lend: MOV.B R5,&P1OUT ; Set all P1 pins BIS.W #LPM4,SR ; LPM NOP ; Required only for debugger
END
Figure 3. MSP430 Assembly Code for Count Character Program.
Here is a short description of the assembly code.
- The comments in a single line start with a column character (;). Multi-line comments can use
C-style /* comment */ notation.
- #include <msp430.h>; This is a C-style pre-processor directive that specifies a header file to
be included in the source. The header file includes all macro definitions, for example, special function register addresses (WDTCTL), and control bits (WDTPW+WDTHOLD).
- Use ORG assembly directive to set the program location counter of the current segment to
the value of an expression that follows. Here ORG 0FF00h sets the location counter at the
absolute address 0FF00h. This means that location counter is moved to this address.
- Next, we allocate the string myStr that will start at the location 0FF00h using DB directive:
myStr DB "HELLO WORLD, I AM THE MSP430!". As explained, this directive will allocate
30 bytes in memory starting at the address 0FF00h and initialize it with the string content.
The content in memory will be as follows: 48 45 4c 4c 4f 20 57 4f 52 4c 44 2c 20 49 20 41
4d 20 54 48 45 20 4d 53 50 34 33 30 21 00.
- How does my program execute on an MSP430? Upon powering-up the MSP430 control
logic always generates a RESET interrupt request (it is the highest priority interrupt request).
The value stored at the address 0xFFFE (the last word in the 64KB address space) is reserved
to keep the starting address of the reset handler (interrupt service routine), and the first thing
that the microcontroller does is to fetch the content from this address and put it in the
program counter (PC, register R0). Thus, the starting address of our program should be stored at location 0xFFFE. Here, we move location counter to 0xFFFE and allocate 2 bytes
(DC16 allocates 16 bits or two bytes) that will be initialized with the starting address of the
main program. The starting address of the main program is marked by the label init.
- RSEG is a segment control assembler directive that controls how code and data are located in
memory. RSEG is used to mark the beginning of a relocatable code or data segment. CODE
and DATA are recognized segment types that are resolved by the linker. The IAR XLINK
linker can recognize any other type of segment (e.g., CSTACK for program stack).
- First instruction initializes the stack pointer register (MOV #SFE(CSTACK), SP). Our program
does not use the stack, so we could have omitted RSEG CSTACK and this instruction.
- The instruction MOV.W #WDTPW+WDTHOLD,&WDTCTL sets certain control bits of the watchdog
timer control register (WDTCTL) to disable it. The watchdog timer by default is active upon reset, generating interrupt requests periodically. As this functionality is not needed in our
program, we simply need to disable it.
- Parallel ports in MSP430 microcontroller can be configured as input or output. A control
register PxDIR determines whether the port x is input or output (we can configure each
individual port pin). Our program drives all pins of the port P1, so it should be configured as the output (P1DIR=0xFF). Register R4 is loaded to point to the first character in the string.
Register R5, the counter, is cleared before starting the main program loop.
- The main loop starts at the gnext label. We use autoincrement addressing mode to read a
new character (one byte) from the string (MOV.B @R4+, R6). The current character is kept in
register R6. We compare the current character with the NULL character (CMP #0, R6). If it
is the NULL character it is the end of the string and we exit the loop (JEQ lend). Pay
attention that we used JEQ instruction? Why?
If it is not the end of the string, we compare the current character with ‘E’. If there is no
match we go back on the first instruction in the loop. Otherwise, we increase the value of the
counter (register R5).
Finally, we move the lower byte from R5 to the parallel port 1, P1OUT=R5[7:0].
Note: Absolute vs. Relocatable Assemblers
Absolute assemblers. When writing assembly programs we know from our hardware design
where the code is to be located in memory. A special directive ORG provides this information to
the assembler. All code is located absolutely at a specific memory address. The simplest form of
assembler is so called absolute assembler. It takes the source assembly file and produces an
executable file that is downloaded to the target system.
Disadvantages of absolute assemblers are as follows: all code must be in one module which is
inconvenient for larger group projects; program becomes less portable across different platforms.
