VHDL Implementation of Interrupt Controller

This project aims at the implementation of Interrupt Controller using VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language). The Interrupt Controller is an integral part of the computer system. It accepts all the interrupts generated, selects the interrupt with the highest priority and generates the appropriate redirected location. The 8259A is one of the most popular interrupt controllers in use today. The 8259A manages 8interrupts according to the instructions written into its control registers. It is designed to minimize the software and real time overhead in handling multi-level priority interrupts. It has several modes, permitting optimization for a variety of system requirements. In this project, the 8259A is designed to handle 15 vectored interrupts using VHDL.VHDL is chosen as the synthesis methodology for the ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) design. The key advantage of VHDL, when used for systems design, is that it allows the behaviour of the required system to be described (modelled) and verified (simulated) before synthesis tools translate the design into real hardware (gates and wires). Another benefit is that VHDL allows the description of a concurrent system. VHDL is a dataflow language, unlike procedural computing languages such as BASIC, C, and assembly code, which all run sequentially, one instruction at a time. Through this project, the Interrupt Controller is intended to be designed in VHDL and tested using simulation in Model Sim.