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AN1776

APPLICATION NOTE

INTERRUPT HANDLING FOR STR7 MICROCONTROLLERS

by MCD Application Team

INTRODUCTION

An exception occurs when the normal flow of a program has to be halted temporarily. The rea-

sons for an exception to occur can be due to an interrupt from a hardware peripheral, a coding

error or incompatibility or even a user-defined exception. In each of these cases, the exception

needs to be 'handled'. This means, the normal program execution needs to be paused, and

the processor needs to be directed to a specially written section of code which performs a se-

ries of predetermined actions. The process of performing these special actions is called ex-

ception handling. This document gives a description of the use of the STR7 interrupt controller

(EIC), as well as how to configure the EIC to be able to handle IRQ and FIQ exception, and

therefore how it can be customized for your own application requirements.

All examples provided with this application note are developed with RVDK 2.1 for ST and op-

timized for the STR710-Demoboard.

This document assumes that the reader is familiar with the ARM7TDMI core and ARM assem-

bler. For more details on the ARM core architecture, refer to the ARM Developer Suite Guide

and the ARM Technical Reference Manual. These documents are available from the ARM

website.

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