Design and Implementation of Programmable Interrupt Controller

Abstract

A high performance Programmable Interrupt Controller is widely used for interfacing a processor with the peripherals. The PIC on a motherboard manages all the hardware interrupts and is part of the southbridge chipset on modern x86 motherboard. PIC is specifically designed for use in real time, interrupt driven microcomputer systems and is an efficient device which can handle multiple interrupt sources where it can acts as a multiplexer, combining multiple interrupt sources into a single interrupt output which interrupts a single device (i.e. CPU). A priority resolver is used to create an interrupt priority hierarchy which assigns priorities to each of the interrupt request inputs. PIC can handle up to eight vectored priority interrupting sources and is cascadable to 64 vectored interrupts without additional circuitry. Individual interrupting sources can be masked or prioritized to allow custom system configuration. The Edge and Level Interrupt trigger modes are supported. The Fixed priority and Rotating priority is also supported. The 8259 can be configured to work with 8-bit and 16-bit microprocessor. In this thesis work, Programmable Interrupt Controller is designed in Verilog HDL and functional simulation is done in modelsim and ISE. The design achieves the minimum delay of 10.640 ns and consumes the total power of 33 mW.