Motorola MCF5282, MCF5281 user manual 68K/ColdFire Interrupt Architecture Overview

68K/ColdFire Interrupt Architecture Overview

correct operation, the ColdFire requires that, once asserted, the interrupt source remain asserted until explicitly disabled by the interrupt service routine.

During the interrupt exception processing, the CPU enters supervisor mode, disables trace mode and then fetches an 8-bit vector from the interrupt controller. This byte-sized operand fetch is known as the interrupt acknowledge (IACK) cycle with the ColdFire implementation using a special encoding of the transfer type and transfer modifier attributes to distinguish this data fetch from a “normal” memory access. The fetched data provides an index into the exception vector table which contains 256 addresses, each pointing to the beginning of a specific exception service routine. In particular, vectors 64 - 255 of the exception vector table are reserved for user interrupt service routines. The first 64 exception vectors are reserved for the processor to handle reset, error conditions (access, address), arithmetic faults, system calls, etc. Once the interrupt vector number has been retrieved, the processor continues by creating a stack frame in memory. For ColdFire, all exception stack frames are 2 longwords in length, and contain 32 bits of vector and status register data, along with the 32-bit program counter value of the instruction that was interrupted (see Section 2.6, “Exception Stack Frame Definition” for more information on the stack frame format). After the exception stack frame is stored in memory, the processor accesses the 32-bit pointer from the exception vector table using the vector number as the offset, and then jumps to that address to begin execution of the service routine. After the status register is stored in the exception stack frame, the SR[I] mask field is set to the level of the interrupt being acknowledged, effectively masking that level and all lower values while in the service routine. For many peripheral devices, the processing of the IACK cycle directly negates the interrupt request, while other devices require that request to be explicitly negated during the processing of the service routine.

For the MCF5282, the processing of the interrupt acknowledge cycle is fundamentally different than previous 68K/ColdFire cores. In the new approach, all IACK cycles are directly handled by the interrupt controller, so the requesting peripheral device is not accessed during the IACK. As a result, the interrupt request must be explicitly cleared in the peripheral during the interrupt service routine. For more information, see Section 10.1.1.3, “Interrupt Vector Determination.”

Unlike the M68000 family, all ColdFire processors guarantee that the first instruction of the service routine is executed before sampling for interrupts is resumed. By making this initial instruction a load of the SR, interrupts can be safely disabled, if required.

During the execution of the service routine, the appropriate actions must be performed on the peripheral to negate the interrupt request.

For more information on exception processing, see the ColdFire Programmer’s Reference Manual at http://www.motorola.com/coldfire

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