Bus Interface Unit, BIU

The Bus Interface unit (BIU)

This unit handles all transfer of data and addresses on the buses for the EU(execution unit). This unit sends out addresses, fetches instructions from memory, reads data from ports and memory and writes data to ports and memory.

Different Parts of BIU:

a.Segment Register

b.Instruction Pointer

c.The Queue

1.)Segment Register:- BIU contains four 16-bit segment registers as follows:

Code segment (CS) register
Stack segment (SS) register
Extra segment (ES) register
Data segment (DS) register

Function of Segment Register:-

Ø In 8086 complete 1MB memory is divided into 16 logical segments.
Ø Each segment thus contains 64 KB of memory.
Ø While addressing any location in the memory bank, the Physical address is calculated from two parts, the first part is Segment address, and the second is Offset.
Ø The segment registers contain 16-bit segment base addresses related to different segments.
Ø Thus the CS, DS, ES, SS segment registers, respectively contain the segment addresses for the Code, Data, Extra and Stack segments.
Ø They may or may not be physical separated.
Ø Each segment register contains a 16-bit base address that points to the lowest-addressed byte of that particular segment in memory.

Memory Address generation:-Now i am going to tell you about how physical memory addresses is determined. For this bus interface unit has used an adder. You will understand the idea for finding the physical address with the help of example.