Bus Operation

Bus is group of conducting lines which carry binary information.

Internal Bus: connects two minor components within a major component (or IC), such
as the connection between the control unit and internal registers of the MPU.
External Bus: connects two major components, such as MPU and an interface (Memory
or input/output). Although some systems include more than one external bus, 8086
and 8088 processors contain only one external bus called system-bus.
Typical system-bus includes: Address-bus (carries physical address of memory or
input/output locations), Data-bus (carries data to be read or written into MPU
registers) and Control-bus(carries information to control the read or write
operation).
Address Bus
• Address bus is used by the μP to select a memory location, from where data
can be read or written.
• The number of address lines varies from one processor to the other processor
and are unidirectional.
• The number of memory locations that the μP can address is determined by
number of address lines. A μP with “N” address lines can address upto 2N locations.
i.e. if a μP contains 16 address lines, it can address 216 memory locations.
Data Bus
• The data bus is a bidirectional bus which carries data between the μP and
other units of microprocessor based system(ie. Memory or I/O devices)
• The number of data lines varies from processor to processor.
• Many devices in a system will have their outputs connected to the data bus,
but only one device at a time will have its outputs enabled
Control bus
The μP issues proper timing and bus control signals to memory and I/O device. It is
unidirectional.
8086 Architecture
The functional block diagram of 8086 is divided into
• Bus Interface Unit (BIU)
• Execution Unit (EU)
While EU decodes and executes instructions, BIU fetches instructions from memory
and stores them in the QUEUE.
BIU and EU operate in parallel independent of each other.
This type of overlapped operation of the functional