Computer engineering in technology

TECHNOLOGY

**An integrated spacing to ground quantum. – Picture from nature.com**

By MICHAEL JOHN UGLO
THE accompaniment of a material device and its construction for an automation to solve daily tasks may be a good opening remark for this lecture. Good day all. We are into the computer engineering lecture today. For preliminary review, recall the time you first put your hand on an automatic device that can do calculations to solve an arithmetic problem like a calculator or a computer. You might have pondered how this material was first constructed and by whom. The above in simple terms specifies what problem-solving is all about using a voltage of a potential difference of an electrical quantity. This is computer engineering in an abridged version. When you have to build an algebraic solution mechanism as in an addition or multiplication, or a basic dyadic, or monadic operation solution structure for a data set, a logic operation involving union, disjunction or conjunctions and complementary operations, that is in all areas, computer engineering.Today we have more devices that are communicating with people or people communicating via devices with people than people directly communicating with people face to face. Even at home, the mobile phonesand in particular those with computing capabilities become people’s closest friends. People spend most of their quality timewith artificial machines than physically with each other.In computer engineering, the most important things to note are firstly, the hardware that physically forms the machine structure that you can physically see and touch like the keyboard, monitor and the circuit-boards that contain the circuitry constructs. Secondly, it comes to the software that you cannot see but they are in electronic storages and programmes that once powered on can do useful jobs. In other words the electronic data storages and processes are intangible. In computer science, the hardware and software become the founding components of the computing device. The mathematical representation of information as appreciated in Shannon model of entropy and information theory with the associated electronics to convert it to readable forms on a visual or audio display unit is paramount. The underlying constructs involve the particular high-level programming language for compilation and storage in memory. The suitable hardware cooperation among the operating system and the low-level application in integrated circuits as registers, flipflops and counters with adders and system circuits with the main memory and the central processor for effective processing and transmission of data and messages. This is the basic arrangement that progresses up the protocol layers for communication to take place via electronic devices from a processor as supervisor and a peripheral device.That speaks of an assembly language to convert data from a source code into a machine language, storage and memory to the microprocessor that produces the object codes for execution as executables or executable files. It then becomes a consumable commodity. One has to have a conducive medium as a semiconductor material like germanium, silicon or others as graphene molecules for nanocomputing or integrated circuits constructed out of memory elements as bistable and logic gates. In any particular application, electrons and the holes as the oppositely charged ions flow in the opposite directions to give a particular electronic device its characteristic feature. That regime of computing is integral in computer engineering.As we get into further discussions, we see that computer engineering involves electrical as well as electronics fields most integrally apart from other areas as chemistry and mathematics. In electrical terms, when you plug and switch your computer on from the power points of your house or office, you are actually using electrical energy from sources such as the Sirinumu dam, Rouna or Yonki dam hydro power stations from your mains supply. The electrical converters in the computer reduces the electrical energy content by inverters to digital from analog signals and vice versa by D/A (digital/analog) or A/D (analog/digital) converters. That conversion is very imperative as it turns into the desired form for information manipulation and generation that a user of a computer wants or benefits from. You will realise that in the technologies of the embedded systems, it allows for wireless transmissions to take place by wireless connections at access points. That allows for effective communications and networking among devices to communicate with each other and also to use different types of addressing systems apart from absolute addresses such as relative addressing based on clusters and other addressing systems. The computing languages with the appropriate proprietary products of electronic devices are fundamental to meet standard protocols to relay information and data passing for effective communication to materialise.

**Electronics and computer engineering. – Picture from pct.edu**

Hardware and software
The computer network as in topologies as Lan(local area network), extranet for public or clients to have access to an intranet of a business firm or a company makes communication and business very efficient. Also, Man (metropolitan area network) as well as Wan ( wide area network) that are interlinked via bridges and routers allows for an online and extensive real-time communication becoming very economical and increases the productive capacity of businesses because they easily get their supplies as well as their customers from them. We also have the architecture in the arithmetic and logic unit, together with the control unit to provide commands by way of registers as computer words for a computer to process information.After an operating system as in a cold boot is loaded from a backing store on to the memory, the information is processed when provided with an instruction set again loaded from the primary memory as the operating system communicates with the hardware and the software to ensure a conducive and compatible customised computing environment.Micro-coding giving rise to microprogramming and caching help in creating parallel processing of information. Programmes can run concurrently and that solves the problem of data traffic congestion requiring too many random-access memory (Ram). This is a special area of development in complex instruction set computers’ word and reduced instruction set for these advanced computers. A computing platform called Risc (reduced instruction set computer) takes as a sequence instructions per cycle and needs more random-access Ram to do that. This is articulate and simple enough to comprehend as it takes instructions and executes them in a series.On the other hand, a Cisc (complex instruction set computer) considers instructions per programme with micro-codes and therefore microprogrammes to execute instructions very effectively and requires less Ram to do that. It is a more complex form of a microprocessor that has specialised circuits purposely made that fetches and executes instructions from the main memory. Therefore, Cisc has fewer Ram and is very fast in its processing time.

Applications in computer engineering
The applications of computer engineering is very broad and vast. We are beneficiaries in this particular field in this technology age, as everything we do in this age is computer-driven, like the use of medical facilities, manufacturing and communication, to name a few. Communications and use of devices as motors and sensors for different purposes are a source for intelligence application such as fixing space vehicles through robots with robot-human interactions in space.Further to that, people can be communicated to on quality control parameters through a proportional, integral and a derivative parameter control in an industrial power plant for instance. Electrical engineering as well as architecture and communications all relate to computer engineering. One needs electrical engineering knowledge in terms of the availability of electrical energy and an electronics engineer needs the availability of the electric signals in radiations to be used in programming and erasing data already written. Also, signal is needed for data processing and signal amplification is needed for its use for retransmissions as amplifiers of microwave signal.
My prayer for PNG today is: As St Paul said, it is no longer that I live but Christ who lives in me. Every time I diminish and Christ increases.
Next week: Mechanics in technology

Michael Uglo is the author the Science textbook “Science in PNG, Pacific, Asia & Caribbean” and a lecturer in Avionics, Auto- Piloting and Aircraft Engineering. Please send comments to: [email protected]