What are the types of Addressing Modes?

The operands of the instructions can be located either in the main memory or in the CPU registers. If the operand is placed in the main memory, then the instruction provides the location address in the operand field. Many methods are followed to specify the operand address. The different methods/modes for specifying the operand address in the instructions are known as addressing modes.

Types of Addressing Modes

There are various types of Addressing Modes which are as follows −

Implied Mode − In this mode, the operands are specified implicitly in the definition of the instruction. For example, the instruction "complement accumulator" is an implied-mode instruction because the operand in the accumulator register is implied in the definition of the instruction. All register reference instructions that use an accumulator are implied-mode instructions.

Instruction format with mode field

Immediate Mode − In this mode, the operand is specified in the instruction itself. In other words, an immediate-mode instruction has an operand field instead of an address field. The operand field includes the actual operand to be used in conjunction with the operation determined in the instruction. Immediate-mode instructions are beneficial for initializing registers to a constant value.

Register Mode − In this mode, the operands are in registers that reside within the CPU. The specific register is selected from a register field in the instruction. A k-bit field can determine any one of the 2^k registers.

Register Indirect Mode − In this mode, the instruction defines a register in the CPU whose contents provide the address of the operand in memory. In other words, the selected register includes the address of the operand rather than the operand itself.

A reference to the register is then equivalent to specifying a memory address. The advantage of a register indirect mode instruction is that the address field of the instruction uses fewer bits to select a register than would have been required to specify a memory address directly.

Autoincrement or Autodecrement Mode &minuend; This is similar to the register indirect mode except that the register is incremented or decremented after (or before) its value is used to access memory. When the address stored in the register defines a table of data in memory, it is necessary to increment or decrement the register after every access to the table. This can be obtained by using the increment or decrement instruction.

Direct Address Mode − In this mode, the effective address is equal to the address part of the instruction. The operand resides in memory and its address is given directly by the address field of the instruction. In a branch-type instruction, the address field specifies the actual branch address.

Indirect Address Mode − In this mode, the address field of the instruction gives the address where the effective address is stored in memory. Control fetches the instruction from memory and uses its address part to access memory again to read the effective address.

Indexed Addressing Mode − In this mode, the content of an index register is added to the address part of the instruction to obtain the effective address. The index register is a special CPU register that contains an index value. The address field of the instruction defines the beginning address of a data array in memory.