Authors: Sivam S. Jadhav, Mohan V. Kulkarni, Ayesha P. Khan
Abstract: Safety critical embedded systems such as automotive controllers, avionics computers, medical devices and industrial automation units demand extremely fast and deterministic response to external events. Interrupt handling plays a very important role in ensuring that such systems react within strict timing constraints. Any delay in servicing interrupts may lead to system instability, failure or even risk to human life. Therefore, low latency interrupt handling is considered as a core requirement in the design of real-time safety systems. This paper reviews the concepts, challenges and techniques for achieving low interrupt latency in safety critical environments. Architectural aspects, operating system support, hardware prioritization, nested interrupts, cache effects, and compiler optimizations are discussed. Practical design strategies and comparisons are presented with tables and diagrams. The study also highlights the importance of deterministic response, preemption, interrupt vectoring, and real time scheduling.
Keywords: Interrupt latency, safety critical systems, real time systems, deterministic response, embedded systems, ISR optimization, interrupt prioritization.
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