interrupt, and jump to the interrupt handling routine corre-
sponding to the highest priority enabled and active interrupt.
Alternately, the user may choose to poll all interrupt pending
and enable bits to determine the source(s) of the interrupt. If
more than one interrupt is active, the user’s program must
decide which interrupt to service.
10.0 Interrupts (Continued)
10.2 MASKABLE INTERRUPTS
All interrupts other than the Software Trap are maskable.
Each maskable interrupt has an associated enable bit and
pending flag bit. The pending bit is set to 1 when the interrupt
condition occurs. The state of the interrupt enable bit, com-
bined with the GIE bit determines whether an active pending
flag actually triggers an interrupt. All of the maskable inter-
rupt pending and enable bits are contained in mapped con-
trol registers, and thus can be controlled by the software.
Within a specific interrupt service routine, the associated
pending bit should be cleared. This is typically done as early
as possible in the service routine in order to avoid missing
the next occurrence of the same type of interrupt event.
Thus, if the same event occurs a second time, even while the
first occurrence is still being serviced, the second occur-
rence will be serviced immediately upon return from the cur-
rent interrupt routine.
A maskable interrupt condition triggers an interrupt under the
following conditions:
1. The enable bit associated with that interrupt is set.
2. The GIE bit is set.
An interrupt service routine typically ends with an RETI in-
struction. This instruction sets the GIE bit back to 1, pops the
address stored on the stack, and restores that address to the
program counter. Program execution then proceeds with the
next instruction that would have been executed had there
been no interrupt. If there are any valid interrupts pending,
the highest-priority interrupt is serviced immediately upon re-
turn from the previous interrupt.
3. The device is not processing a non-maskable interrupt.
(If
a non-maskable interrupt is being serviced, a
maskable interrupt must wait until that service routine is
completed.)
An interrupt is triggered only when all of these conditions are
met at the beginning of an instruction. If different maskable
interrupts meet these conditions simultaneously, the highest
priority interrupt will be serviced first, and the other pending
interrupts must wait.
10.3 VIS INSTRUCTION
The general interrupt service routine, which starts at address
00FF Hex, must be capable of handling all types of inter-
rupts. The VIS instruction, together with an interrupt vector
table, directs the device to the specific interrupt handling rou-
tine based on the cause of the interrupt.
Upon Reset, all pending bits, individual enable bits, and the
GIE bit are reset to zero. Thus, a maskable interrupt condi-
tion cannot trigger an interrupt until the program enables it by
setting both the GIE bit and the individual enable bit. When
enabling an interrupt, the user should consider whether or
not a previously activated (set) pending bit should be ac-
knowledged. If, at the time an interrupt is enabled, any pre-
vious occurrences of the interrupt should be ignored, the as-
sociated pending bit must be reset to zero prior to enabling
the interrupt. Otherwise, the interrupt may be simply en-
abled; if the pending bit is already set, it will immediately trig-
ger an interrupt. A maskable interrupt is active if its associ-
ated enable and pending bits are set.
VIS is a single-byte instruction, typically used at the very be-
ginning of the general interrupt service routine at address
00FF Hex, or shortly after that point, just after the code used
for context switching. The VIS instruction determines which
enabled and pending interrupt has the highest priority, and
causes an indirect jump to the address corresponding to that
interrupt source. The jump addresses (vectors) for all pos-
sible interrupts sources are stored in a vector table.
The vector table may be as long as 32 bytes (maximum of 16
vectors) and resides at the top of the 256-byte block contain-
ing the VIS instruction. However, if the VIS instruction is at
the very top of a 256-byte block (such as at 00FF Hex), the
vector table resides at the top of the next 256-byte block.
Thus, if the VIS instruction is located somewhere between
00FF and 01DF Hex (the usual case), the vector table is lo-
cated between addresses 01E0 and 01FF Hex. If the VIS in-
struction is located between 01FF and 02DF Hex, then the
vector table is located between addresses 02E0 and 02FF
Hex, and so on.
An interrupt is an asychronous event which may occur be-
fore, during, or after an instruction cycle. Any interrupt which
occurs during the execution of an instruction is not acknowl-
edged until the start of the next normally executed instruction
is to be skipped, the skip is performed before the pending in-
terrupt is acknowledged.
At the start of interrupt acknowledgment, the following ac-
tions occur:
1. The GIE bit is automatically reset to zero, preventing any
subsequent maskable interrupt from interrupting the cur-
rent service routine. This feature prevents one maskable
interrupt from interrupting another one being serviced.
Each vector is 15 bits long and points to the beginning of a
specific interrupt service routine somewhere in the 32 kbyte
memory space. Each vector occupies two bytes of the vector
table, with the higher-order byte at the lower address. The
vectors are arranged in order of interrupt priority. The vector
of the maskable interrupt with the lowest rank is located to
0yE0 (higher-order byte) and 0yE1 (lower-order byte). The
next priority interrupt is located at 0yE2 and 0yE3, and so
forth in increasing rank. The Software Trap has the highest
rank and its vector is always located at 0yFE and 0yFF. The
number of interrupts which can become active defines the
size of the table.
2. The address of the instruction about to be executed is
pushed onto the stack.
3. The program counter (PC) is loaded with 00FF Hex,
causing a jump to that program memory location.
The device requires seven instruction cycles to perform the
actions listed above.
If the user wishes to allow nested interrupts, the interrupts
service routine may set the GIE bit to 1 by writing to the PSW
register, and thus allow other maskable interrupts to interrupt
the current service routine. If nested interrupts are allowed,
caution must be exercised. The user must write the program
in such a way as to prevent stack overflow, loss of saved
context information, and other unwanted conditions.
Table 6 shows the types of interrupts, the interrupt arbitration
ranking, and the locations of the corresponding vectors in
the vector table.
The vector table should be filled by the user with the memory
locations of the specific interrupt service routines. For ex-
The interrupt service routine stored at location 00FF Hex
should use the VIS instruction to determine the cause of the
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