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 ...

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 ...

Different tasks in an embedded system typically must share the same hardware and software resources or may rely on each other in order to function correctly. For these reasons, embedded OSs provide ...

A recent announcement from Micro Digital explained how the company's smx real-time operating system can do precise profiling of code operations. “… smx v4.1 solves this problem by using the clock ...

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 ...

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, ...

This article is part of the Ideas for Design Series: Vol. 3, No. 8. In many applications, accurately sensing the position of an electrically controlled mechanical device such as a motor is critical.

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 ...

When do you need to use a real-time operating system (RTOS) for an embedded project? What does it bring to the table, and what are the costs? Fortunately there are strict technical definitions, which ...