1. Addressing modes are nothing but the different ways in which the location of an operand can be specified in an instruction. The number of addressing modes that a processor supports changes according to the instruction set it is based on, however there are a few generic ones that are present in almost all processors and are thus of utmost importance.

2. They are as follows:

   i. Immediate mode

   ii. Register mode

   iii. Absolute mode

   iv. Indirect mode

   v. Index mode

   vi. Base with index

   vii. Base with index and offset

   viii. Relative

   ix. Auto increment

   x. Auto decrement

Immediate mode: In this mode, the operand is specified in the instruction itself.

E.g. Move #200,R0

The above instruction places the value 200 in the register R0.Clearly Immediate mode can be used only to specify the source operand.

Figure 1 shows the above concept i.e. the operand is a part of the instruction

Register mode: The operand is the contents of a register. We specify the operand in this case by specifying the name of the register in the instruction. Processor registers are often used for intermediate storage during arithmetic operations. This addressing mode is used at that time to access the registers.

E.g. Move R0, R1

Contents of the R0 register are moved to R1 register.

As shown in Figure 2, the instruction names the register that holds the operand.

Absolute mode: The operand is in a memory location; the address of the operand is passed explicitly in the instruction. Global variables are represented using this addressing mode.

E.g. Move LOC, R0

Here LOC corresponds to the address from where the contents will be accessed by the processor and placed in R0.

Indirect mode: The effective address (E.A.) of the operands is the contents of a register (see Figure 3(b)) or the memory location whose address appears in the instruction (see Figure 3(a)). The name of the register or the memory address is placed in parentheses to denote indirection or in other words that the contents are addresses of the operands.

E.g. Add (R1), R0 (this mode is often called as register indirect mode) Add (B), R0

This instruction fetches the operand from the address, pointed by the contents of the register R1 or of the memory location ‘B’ and adds them to R0.

Index mode: The effective address of the operand is calculated by adding a constant value to the contents of a register, which is clearly shown in Figure 4. The address can be in a register used specially for this purpose or any of the general purpose registers. In either case it is called as an index register.

E.g. Move X (R0), R1

Here, Contents at address X+R0 are moved to R1 .X contains a constant value.

Base with index mode: The effective address is the sum of contents of two registers. The first register as before is called the index and the second register is called the base register. This mode provides more flexibility since both the components are registers and can thus be changed.

E.g. Move (R0, R1), R2

Here, Contents at address R0+R1 are moved to R2.

Base with index and offset mode: The effective address is the sum of contents of two registers and a constant. The constant value in this case is often called the offset or the displacement.

E.g. Move X (R0, R1), R2

Contents at address X+R0+R1 are moved to R2.

Relative mode: For relative addressing, also called PC-relative addressing, the implicitly referenced register is the program counter (PC). That is, the next instruction address is added to the address field to produce the EA. typically, the address field is treated as a twos complement number for this operation. Thus, the effective address is a displacement relative to the address of the instruction as shown in the example below.

Relative addressing exploits the concept of locality.

E.g. Move X (PC), R1

Here, Contents at address X+PC are moved to R1 .X contains a constant value.

Auto increment mode: The effective address of the operand is the contents of a register specified in the instruction. After accessing the operand, the contents of this register are automatically incremented to the next value. This increment is 1 for byte sized operands, 2 for 16 bit operands and so on.

E.g. Add (R2) +, R0

Here are the contents of R2 are first used as an E.A. then they are incremented.

Auto decrement mode: The effective address of the operand is the contents of a register specified in the instruction. Before accessing the operand, the contents of this register are automatically decremented and then the value is accessed.

E.g. Add - (R2), R0

Here are the contents of R2 are first decremented and then used as an E.A. for the operand which is added to the contents of R0. The auto increment addressing mode and the auto decrement addressing mode are widely used for the implementation of data structures like Stack. There may be other addressing modes that are unique to some processors. However the addressing modes mentioned above are common to many of the popular processors out there.