Programming Embedded Systems, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Interrupts

And, as Miss [Florence] Nightingale was so vehemently to complain—“women never have an half hour... that they can call their own”—she was always interrupted.

—Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at interrupts—a sophisticated way of managing relationships with external devices. Interrupts are an important aspect of embedded software development and one that programmers need to study carefully in order to create efficient applications. The start of this chapter gives an introduction to interrupts and different characteristics associated with them. It is important to understand what happens when an interrupt event occurs and how the interrupt is processed. Although the implementation of interrupts is processor-specific, much of the material in this chapter applies to all processors. Finally, we will expand on the Blinking LED example by using an interrupt found in practically all processors.

Overview

An interrupt can be used to signal the processor for all sorts of events—for example, because data has arrived and can be read, a user flipped a switch, or a specific amount of time has elapsed.

Interrupts allow developers to separate time-critical operations from the main program to ensure they are processed in a prioritized manner. Because interrupts are asynchronous events, they can happen at any time during the main program’s execution.

Figure 8-1 shows two alternative wiring diagrams of peripherals connected to the processor interrupt ...