An Interrupt Controller for FPGA-based Multiprocessors

Abstract

Interrupt-based programming is widely used for interfacing a processor with peripherals and allowing software threads to interact. Many hardware/software architectures have been proposed in the past to support this kind of programming practice. In the context of FPGA-based multiprocessors this topic has not been thoroughly faced yet. This paper presents the architecture of an interrupt controller for a FPGA-based multiprocessor composed of standard off-of-the-shelf softcores. The main feature of this device is to distribute multiple interrupts across the cores of a multiprocessor. In addition, our architecture supports several advanced features like booking, broadcasting and inter-processor interrupt. On the top of this hardware layer, we provide a software library to effectively exploit this mechanism. We realized a prototype of this system. Our experiments show that our interrupt controller efficiently distributes multiple interrupts on the system.