Rainbow Electronics ATAR862-8 - Manual (Page 19)

19
ATAR862-8
4589B–4BMCU–02/03
Interrupt Processing For processing the eight interrupt levels, the MARC4 includes an interrupt controller with
two 8-bit wide interrupt pending and interrupt active registers. The interrupt controller
samples all interrupt requests during every non-I/O instruction cycle and latches these in
the interrupt pending register. If no higher priority interrupt is present in the interrupt
active register, it signals the CPU to interrupt the current program execution. If the inter-
rupt enable bit is set, the processor enters an interrupt acknowledge cycle. During this
cycle a short call (SCALL) instruction to the service routine is executed and the current
PC is saved on the return stack. An interrupt service routine is completed with the RTI
instruction. This instruction resets the corresponding bits in the interrupt pending/active
register and fetches the return address from the return stack to the program counter.
When the interrupt enable flag is reset (triggering of interrupt routines is disabled), the
execution of new interrupt service routines is inhibited but not the logging of the interrupt
requests in the interrupt pending register. The execution of the interrupt is delayed until
the interrupt enable flag is set again. Note that interrupts are only lost if an interrupt
request occurs while the corresponding bit in the pending register is still set (i.e., the
interrupt service routine is not yet finished).
It should be noted that automatic stacking of the RBR is not carried out by the hardware
and so if ROM banking is used, the RBR must be stacked on the expression stack by
the application program and restored before the RTI. After a master reset (power-on,
brown-out or watchdog reset), the interrupt enable flag and the interrupt pending and
interrupt active register are all reset.
Interrupt Latency The interrupt latency is the time from the occurrence of the interrupt to the interrupt ser-
vice routine being activated. This is extremely short (taking between 3 to 5 machine
cycles depending on the state of the core).
Figure 15. Interrupt Handling
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Pr
ior
ity level
INT5 active
INT7 active
INT2 pending
SWI0
INT2 active
INT0 pending INT0 active
INT2
RTI
RTI
INT5
INT3 active
INT3
RTI
RTI
RTI
INT7
Time
Main /
Autosleep
Main /
Autosleep