I am learning MIPS 32 bit. I wanted to ask that why do we Sign Extend the 16 bit offset (in Single Cycle Datapath) before sending it to the ALU in case of Store Word?
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Sounds like the 16-bit offset is a signed 2’s complement number, i.e. it can be either positive or negative.
When converting it to 32 bits, the most significant bit needs to be copied to the upper 16 bits in order to keep the sign information.