Interrupts (IRQ)

The interrupt vector is set to memory address 0 (bottom of SRAM). The program counter switches to this location when an interrupt is received. To enable interrupts, it is necessary to copy an interrupt handler to memory location 0. The PicoRV32 defines 32 IRQ channels, of which the Caravel chip uses only a handful, as described in the CPU IRQ channel definitions. All IRQ channels not in the CPU IRQ channel definitions always have value zero.

Table 18 CPU IRQ channel definitions

IRQ channel	description
4	UART interface data available
5	IRQ external pin (IRQ E5 pin)
6	Housekeeping SPI IRQ
7	Assignable interrupt (see reg_irq7_source)
9	SPI controller data available, when enabled (see reg_spi_config)
10	Timer 0 expired, when enabled (see reg_timer0_config)
11	Timer 1 expired, when enabled (see reg_timer1_config)

The Caravel PicoRV32 implementation does not enable IRQ QREGS (see PicoRV32 description).

The handling of interrupts is beyond the scope of this document (see RISC-V instruction set description). All interrupts are masked and must be enabled in software.