intMAN: Priority-Driven Load-Adaptive Monitoring-Based Hardware for Managing Interrupts in Embedded Event-Triggered Real-Time Systems

task, scheduling, real time, system, embedded, load, monitoring, interrupt management, excessive interrupt rate, overload prevention, FPGA, Xilinx, Spartan-6, VHDL

Prototype of a hardware unit for preventing real-time systems from overloads caused by excessive interrupt rates. Novelty of the hardware can be seen in the fact it is able to adapt interrupt service rate to the RT system load and to the actual priority assignment policy. The load is monitored on basis of special low-overhead signals produced by the system for this purpose. The hardware is designed to analyze all interrupt stimuli and decide whether they should be forwarded do the system or temporarily deferred. The hardware is ready to buffer interrupt requests until the system is underloaded or running an activity having lower priority comparing to the interrupt. Design of the hardware was described in VHDL and synthesized into FPGA devices from the Xilinx Spartan-6 family.

Department of Computer Systems, Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology, Božetěchova 2, 612 66 Brno

• pdf Electrical schematics 353 KB
• JPG Experimental platform 761 KB
• JPG Platforma - stackup.JPG 599 KB
• zip VHDL - sources and manuals 4311 KB