Nand2Tetris – The ALU Chip

In Chapter 2 of Nand2Tetris we build the Arithmetic Logic Unit chip. It has 2 16-bit inputs and 1 16-bit output. While providing the inputs you also specify the arithmetic operation you want to perform; . This ALU chip is designed to become the centerpiece of HACK.

In addition to ALU’s there are FPU’s (Floating Point Unit) and CPU’s (Central Processing Unit). ALU’s are used to build these more complex chips, which may contain many ALU’s.

John von Neumann proposed ALU’s in 1945 but components were large and expensive for the type of ALU we are building now.
Initially, they performed operations on single bit data. Now that we have integrated circuit (IC) transistors we are able to build ALU’s so complex they can handle operations in a single clock cycle.

Someone in my group documented errors you may come across building the ALU. Hope this helps, https://github.com/SeaRbSg/nand2tetris2017/tree/master/jwfearn/tips.

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