8086 Microprocessor Features & Flag registers

Presented by
Mr. Pallav Mandve

Under the guidance of

Mr. S. V. Banabakode

G. H. RAISONI INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY

Department of Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering
 Introduction to microprocessor

The microprocessor is a general purpose programmable logic

device.
It is the brain of the computer and it performs all the computational
tasks, calculations, data processing etc. inside the computer.
 In the computers, the most popular type of the processor is the
Intel Pentium.
Features of 8086 microprocessor
 It is an enhanced version of 8085 microprocessor designed by intel in 1976.
 It is a 40 pin IC .
 It is a 16 bit processor.
 Single +5V power supply.
 It has 20 Address lines A0 – A19 and 16 data lines D0 – D15.
 Address and data lines multiplexed AD0 to AD15 except A16 to A19.
 Frequency range – 5 to 10 Mhz.
 It can support 64 K I/O ports.
 It has 16 bit ALU, 16 bit registers, internal data bus, external data bus.
 It has 256 interrupts.
 It supports two modes of operation :
1) Maximum mode – System having multiple processor.
2)Minimum mode – System having single processor.
 8086 is available in 3 version
 a) 8086 – 5 MHz
 b) 8086-2 -8 MHz
c) 8086-1 – 10 Mhz
It has powerful instruction set which provides MUL (multiplication) and
DIV(divison) operations.
It uses two stages of pipelining, i.e. Fetch Stage and Execute Stage, which
improves performance.
 Fetch stage can prefetch up to 6 bytes of instructions and stores them in the
queue.
 Flag register

 A flag is a Flip-Flop (FF) which indicates some condition

produced by the execution of an instruction or controls certain
operations of the EU. The flag register contains (9) flags as
shown in figure
Flag register of 8086 microprocessor
1) Carry flag (CF)
In the case of addition this flag is set if there is a carry out of the MSB.
The carry flag also serves as a borrow flag for subtraction. In case of
subtraction it is set when borrow is needed.

2) Parity Flag (PF)

It is set to 1 if result of byte operation or lower byte of the word operation
contains an even number of ones; otherwise it is zero.

3) Auxiliary Flag (AF)

This flag is set if there is an overflow out of bit i.e., carry from lower nibble
to higher nibble (D3 bit to D4 bit). This flag is used for BCD operations and
it is not available for the programmer.
4) Zero Flag (ZF)
The zero flag sets if the result of operation in ALU is zero and flag resets if
the result is non-zero. The zero flag also set if certain register content
becomes zero following an increment or decrement operation of that
register.

5) Sign Flag (SF)

After the execution of arithmetic or logical operations, if the MSB of the
result is 1, the sign bit is set. Sign bit 1 indicates the result is negative;
otherwise it is positive.
6) Overflow Flag (OF)
This flag is set if the result is out of range. For addition this
flag is set when there is a carry into the MSB and no carry out
of the MSB or vice-versa. For subtraction, it is set when the
MSB needs a borrow and there is no borrow from the MSB, or
vice-versa.
Set to 1 when there is a signed overflow.

7)Trap Flag (TF) 

Used for on-chip debugging.
8) Direction Flag (DF) 
This flag is used by some instructions to process data chains, when this
flag is set to 0 - the processing is done forward, when this flag is set
to 1 the processing is done backward. 

9) Interrupt Flag (I)

This flag is for interrupts.
If interrupt flag is set (1), the microprocessor will recognize interrupt
requests from the peripherals.
If interrupt flag is reset (0), the microprocessor will not recognize any
interrupt requests and will ignore them.
THANK YOU