Immediate Addressing

Instructions that use immediate addressing have data assembled as a part of the instruction itself. For example, the instruction CPI 'C' may be interpreted as compare the contents of the accumulator with the letter C. When assembled, this instruction has the hexadecimal value FE43. Hexadecimal 43 is the internal representation for the letter C. When this instruction is executed, the processor fetches the first instruction byte and determines that it must fetch one more byte. The processor fetches the next byte into one of its internal registers and then performs the compare operation.

Notice that the names of the immediate instructions indicate that they use immediate data. Thus, the name of an add instruction is ADD; the name of an add immediate instruction is ADI.

All but two of the immediate instructions uses the accumulator as an implied operand, as in the CPI instruction shown previously. The MVI (move immediate) instruction can move its immediate data to any of the working registers including the accumulator or to memory. Thus, the instruction MVI D, OFFH moves the hexadecimal

value FF to the D register.

The LXI instruction (load register pair immediate) is even more unusual in that its immediate data is a 16-bit value. This instruction is commonly used to load addresses into a register pair. As mentioned previously, your program must initialize the stack pointer; LXI is the instruction most commonly used for this purpose. For example, the instruction LXI SP,3OFFH loads the stack pointer with the hexadecimal value 30FF.

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