Nios® II Processor Reference Guide

ID 683836
Date 8/28/2023
Public
Document Table of Contents

3.7.6.2. Internal Interrupt Controller

When the internal interrupt controller is implemented, a peripheral device can request a hardware interrupt by asserting one of the Nios® II processor’s 32 interrupt-request inputs, irq0 through irq31. A hardware interrupt is generated if and only if all three of these conditions are true:
  • The PIE bit of the status control register is one.
  • An interrupt-request input, irqn, is asserted.
  • The corresponding bit n of the ienable control register is one.

Upon hardware interrupt, the processor clears the PIE bit to zero, disabling further interrupts, and performs the other steps outlined in the "Exception Processing Flow" section of this chapter.

The value of the ipending control register shows which interrupt requests (IRQ) are pending. By peripheral design, an IRQ bit is guaranteed to remain asserted until the processor explicitly responds to the peripheral.

Note: Although shadow register sets can be implemented in any Nios II/f processor, the internal interrupt controller does not have features to take advantage of it as external interrupt controllers do.
Figure 5. Relationship Between ienable, ipending, PIE and Hardware Interrupts