LM3S5956-IQR80-C1 Datasheet, PDF (103/1144 Pages) Texas Instruments – Stellaris® LM3S5956 Microcontroller

NRND: Not recommended for new designs.
Stellaris^® LM3S5956 Microcontroller
2.5.7.1
■ Tail-Chaining. This mechanism speeds up exception servicing. On completion of an exception
handler, if there is a pending exception that meets the requirements for exception entry, the
stack pop is skipped and control transfers to the new exception handler.
■ Late-Arriving. This mechanism speeds up preemption. If a higher priority exception occurs
during state saving for a previous exception, the processor switches to handle the higher priority
exception and initiates the vector fetch for that exception. State saving is not affected by late
arrival because the state saved is the same for both exceptions. Therefore, the state saving
continues uninterrupted. The processor can accept a late arriving exception until the first instruction
of the exception handler of the original exception enters the execute stage of the processor. On
return from the exception handler of the late-arriving exception, the normal tail-chaining rules
apply.
Exception Entry
Exception entry occurs when there is a pending exception with sufficient priority and either the
processor is in Thread mode or the new exception is of higher priority than the exception being
handled, in which case the new exception preempts the original exception.
When one exception preempts another, the exceptions are nested.
Sufficient priority means the exception has more priority than any limits set by the mask registers
(see PRIMASK on page 84, FAULTMASK on page 85, and BASEPRI on page 86). An exception
with less priority than this is pending but is not handled by the processor.
When the processor takes an exception, unless the exception is a tail-chained or a late-arriving
exception, the processor pushes information onto the current stack. This operation is referred to as
stacking and the structure of eight data words is referred to as stack frame.
Figure 2-7. Exception Stack Frame
...
{aligner}
xPSR
PC
LR
R12
R3
R2
R1
R0
Pre-IRQ top of stack
IRQ top of stack
Immediately after stacking, the stack pointer indicates the lowest address in the stack frame.
The stack frame includes the return address, which is the address of the next instruction in the
interrupted program. This value is restored to the PC at exception return so that the interrupted
program resumes.
In parallel to the stacking operation, the processor performs a vector fetch that reads the exception
handler start address from the vector table. When stacking is complete, the processor starts executing
the exception handler. At the same time, the processor writes an EXC_RETURN value to the LR,
indicating which stack pointer corresponds to the stack frame and what operation mode the processor
was in before the entry occurred.
If no higher-priority exception occurs during exception entry, the processor starts executing the
exception handler and automatically changes the status of the corresponding pending interrupt to
active.
October 06, 2012
103
Texas Instruments-Production Data