A flexible real-time architecture

Assuring hard real-time characteristics of I/O associated with embedded software is often a difficult task. Input-Output related statements are often intermixed with the computational code, resulting in I/O timing that is dependent on the execution path and computational load. One way to mitigate this problem is through the use of interrupts. However, the non-determinism that is introduced by interrupt driven I/O may be so difficult to analyze that it is prohibited in some high consequence systems. This paper describes a balanced hardware/software solution to obtain consistent, interrupt-free I/O timing, and results in software that is much more amenable to analysis.