Embedded systems are deemed real-time if they will suffer a failure when a critical system event cannot be serviced in the required time, and for many embedded systems this time limit is very short.

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, ...

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 ...

Interrupts are a major feature of most embedded microcontrollers and effective real time response to interrupts is vital in low power systems that often rely on a ‘run fast then stop’ approach to ...

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 ...

A computer cannot meet its requirements unless it communicates with its external devices. An interrupt is a communication gateway between the device and a processor. The allocation of an interrupt ...

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 ...

What’s the biggest difference between writing code for your big computer and a microcontroller? OK, the memory and limited resources, sure. But we were thinking more about the need to directly ...