Intel 8259 - History

History

The 8259 was introduced as part of Intel's MCS 85 family in 1976. The 8259A was included in the original PC introduced in 1981 and maintained by the PC/XT when introduced in 1983. A second 8259A was added with the introduction of the PC/AT. The 8259 has coexisted with the Intel APIC Architecture since its introduction in Symmetric Multi-Processor PCs. Modern PCs have begun to phase out the 8259A in favor of the Intel APIC Architecture. However, while not anymore a separate chip, the 8259A interface is still provided by the Southbridge chipset on modern x86 motherboards.

The main signal pins on an 8259 are as follows: eight interrupt input request lines named IRQ0 through IRQ7, an interrupt request output line named INTR, interrupt acknowledgment line named INTA, D0 through D7 for communicating the interrupt level or vector offset. Other connections include CAS0 through CAS2 for cascading between 8259s.

Up to eight slave 8259s may be cascaded to a master 8259 to provide up to 64 IRQs. 8259s are cascaded by connecting the INT line of one slave 8259 to the IRQ line of one master 8259.

There are three registers, an Interrupt Mask Register (IMR), an Interrupt Request Register (IRR), and an In-Service Register (ISR). The IRR maintains a mask of the current interrupts that are pending acknowledgement, the ISR maintains a mask of the interrupts that are pending an EOI, and the IMR maintains a mask of interrupts that should not be sent an acknowledgement.

End Of Interrupt (EOI) operations support specific EOI, non-specific EOI, and auto-EOI. A specific EOI specifies the IRQ level it is acknowledging in the ISR. A non-specific EOI resets the IRQ level in the ISR. Auto-EOI resets the IRQ level in the ISR immediately after the interrupt is acknowledged.

Edge and level interrupt trigger modes are supported by the 8259A. Fixed priority and rotating priority modes are supported.

The 8259 may be configured to work with an 8080/8085 or an 8086/8088. On the 8086/8088, the interrupt controller will provide an interrupt number on the data bus when an interrupt occurs. The interrupt cycle of the 8080/8085 will issue three bytes on the data bus (corresponding to a CALL instruction in the 8080/8085 instruction set).

The 8259A provides additional functionality compared to the 8259 (in particular buffered mode and level-triggered mode) and is upward compatible with it.