Motorola MVME172 manual Tick Timers, Watchdog Timer

Functional Blocks

Tick Timers

The VMEchip2 includes two general purpose tick timers. These timers can be used to generate interrupts at various rates or the counters can be read at various times for interval timing. The timers have a resolution of 1 μs and when free running, they roll over every 71.6 minutes.

Each tick timer has a 32-bit counter, a 32-bit compare register, a 4-bit overflow register, an enable bit, an overflow clear bit, and a clear-on-compare enable bit. The counter is readable and writable at any time and when enabled in the free run mode, it increments every 1μs. When the counter is enabled in the clear-on-compare mode, it increments every 1μs until the counter value matches the value in the compare register. When a match occurs, the counter is cleared. When a match occurs, in either mode, an interrupt is sent to the local bus interrupter and the overflow counter is incremented. An interrupt to the local bus is only generated if the tick timer interrupt is enabled by the local bus interrupter. The overflow counter can be cleared by writing a one to the overflow clear bit.

Tick timer one or two can be programmed to generate a pulse on the VMEbus IRQ1 interrupt line at the tick timer period. This provides a broadcast interrupt function which allows several VME boards to receive an interrupt at the same time. In certain applications, this interrupt can be used to synchronize multiple processors. This interrupt is not acknowledged on the VMEbus. This mode is intended for specific applications and is not defined in the VMEbus specification.

Watchdog Timer

The watchdog timer has a 4-bit counter, four clock select bits, an enable bit, a local reset enable bit, a SYSRESET enable bit, a board fail enable bit, counter reset bit, WDTO status bit, and WDTO status reset bit.

When enabled, the counter increments at a rate determined by the clock select bits. If the counter is not reset by software, the counter reaches its terminal count. When this occurs, the WDTO status bit is set; and if the local or SYSRESET function is enabled, the selected reset is generated; if the board fail function is enabled, the board fail signal is generated.

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