Michael Lemmon
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Notre Dame
Micro-controllers are micro-computers whose architecture has been optimized to respond quickly to external events. The direct mapping of IO pins into the processor's address space is one way this goal is achieved. Another way of achieving this goal is through a rich set of hardware interrupts. This learning modules focuses on a specific type of hardware interrupt known as the output compare interrupt. Output compare interrupts are hardware interrupts that are tied to timer events and this means that they can be used by a micro-controller to enforce the real-time processing of events.