ELEC2630 EMBEDDED

SYSTEMS THEORY
Lecture 7: Interrupts
 INTERRUPTS
• INTERRUPTS change the flow of the program but
normally in response to a hardware event
• This could be a signal received from outside the
microcontroller or from one of the peripherals
inside the device itself
• The microcontroller saves the address of the next
instruction on the stack before changing the
program counter to the address of the interrupt
routine in memory
• This can be fixed or partly supplied by the
interrupting device
• A special type of return is used to go back to the
address saved on the stack
 Interrupts and ‘C’
• ‘C’ was initially designed before micro-controllers
or any small computing device capable of running
the large amount of code space required
• All the machines that ‘C’ ran on, Mainframe or
mini-computers, had an operating system which
handled all the low level hardware interfacing
tasks so interrupts were dealt with at that level
• Later, when the idea of cross-compiling to the
machine code for a small device was developed,
each compiler writer devised their own extension
to ‘C’ to carry out the task
 C Interrupt Handling Example
• If the micro-controller device had only one
address for the interrupt code (often called an
interrupt vector) then only one C function could be
associated with interrupts
• At the assembler level the actual place in memory
can be set by an “origin” command but C does
not normally use such direct methods
• A very common method is to use a Keyword
within the normal function definition to indicate
that this function should be associated with the
interrupt.
• The C compiler would then use this message to
arrange for the machine code to be generated for
the correct address for the hardware
 Interrupt Handling
• A solution used by the C compilers supplied by
Htsoft for PIC micro-controllers uses the keyword
“interrupt”
• Note the function using this keyword must be of
type “void” because there is no mechanism for an
interrupt function to return a value directly, i.e.
You cannot have a return(value); as part of the
interrupt function
• The function cannot receive a value as input as it
is not called from anywhere within the normal
code
• void interrupt 2630int (void); would be the form
of the function prototype for an interrupt routine
 Interrupt handling
• How do we handle a number of different
interrupts when only one interrupt location exists,
and thus only one interrupt function is allowed?
• At the assembler level the interrupts can be
checked individually, so C code using similar
methods can be used provided the code is all
inside the one function
• A number of functions could be “called” from
within that function, each dealing with a different
interrupt if required, although there would be a
time penalty in using this approach
 Interrupt Handling
• Each interrupt sets a flag when it occurs and
interrupts the micro-controller if it is enabled to do
so
• These flags are individual bits within a single
variable
• A test of a bit could determine whether to call the
function for that interrupt, as the flag is normally
cleared during setup, so a logic 1 bit would
indicate that interrupt has occured and that the
particular function is needed to “service” it. This is
the term normally used for code responding to an
interrupt
 Interrupt Code example
• Here is an example where the flags are in a
variable called int-flags
• Void interrupt 2630int ()
{
if(int-flags & 1)
void int1();
if(int-flags & 2)
void int2();
}
 Points to note
• C compiler may have methods for
manipulating individual bits in a variable
• The method shown, “bitwise and” will work
with any compiler
• The htsoft compiler for the F18 devices is
very efficient and will check if the task
being done in the C has a direct
counterpart in the assembler, and if so it
will use it
• In the case shown a “BTFSC int-flags,1”
would be a direct replacement of the first
part of the IF and a “GOTO _int1” is the
rest
 Interrupt Priorities
• The priority defines the order in which the
interrupts are serviced if more than one occurs at
once
• How is the priority set in the example on the last
slide?
• One hardware method employed in micro-
controllers is the use of multiple interrupt vectors
where the vector called by the interrupt sets the
priority
• Higher priority interrupts can interrupt a lower
priority interrupt whilst it is executing
• The stack is used to take care of this example of
“nesting”
 Problems in this approach
• Context switching, how do we prevent the
registers being used in the first interrupt
being corrupted by reuse in the second
interrupt
• Multiple vectors mean more than one C
function can use an interrupt so how is C
extended again to cope with this new
situation
• These are questions to be answered in the
next lecture