ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERTER WITH EARLY INTERRUPT CAPABILITY

An early interrupt feature enables generation of interrupts prior to completion of an analog-to-digital conversion to be used in a processor PID calculation. Even though an analog-to-digital conversion is still in process, the PID application software can use the early interrupt time to begin execution of an interrupt service routine (ISR). The early interrupt can improve the throughput and response time of the PID control loop by overlapping the completion of the ADC conversion with the processor overhead associated with the interrupt request. A plurality of pipelined registers, each having substantially the same delay time as the pipelined stages of the ADC, are selectable to provided a delay time that may be used to generate an early interrupt, wherein the latency time between an ADC conversion and processing of an interrupt relating to that ADC conversion may thereby be shortened.