For most UNIX systems, Linux included, device drivers typically divide the work of processing interrupts into two parts or halves. The first part, the top half, is the familiar interrupt handler, ...

Just as you can often treat device registers as a memory-mapped struct, you can treat an interrupt vector as a memory-mapped array. In my last column, I suggested that you use casts sparingly and with ...

Performance is a topic that never strays far from the mind of most embedded systems developers. However, relatively speaking, many of us have it easy. We develop soft real-time systems in which a few ...

In a System-on Chip(SoC),a general interrupt process works as follows: Interrupt is triggered by a certain system event or interrupt source. Interrupt is detected by system’s peripheral module, which ...

This paper will discuss design practices and guidelines that will maximize the efficiency of interrupts and interrupt handling in an embedded system IC. These practices can result in a smaller code ...

Editor's Note: Linux remains an attractive option for embedded systems developers. In fact, industry surveys such as the Embedded Market Study by UBM (EDN's parent company) consistently show interest ...

When a WFI instruction is executed or when the processor enters sleep mode using the Sleep-On-Exit feature, the processor stops instruction execution and wakes up when an (higher priority) interrupt ...