Design of a configurable general-purpose Input/Output with event-capture

Embedded systems normally have a large number of simple peripherals or circuits. These peripherals do not need to use complex protocols to connect with CPU. Therefore, modern embedded system provides some general-purpose Input/Output ( GPIO) pins that can be configured as either inputs or outputs. For debugging the embedded systems, users could input or output some simple commands with GPIO pins and produce interrupts. However, the standard GPIO can not support to generate different interrupts with different port signals. The proposed GPIO can provide more powerful capability of signal detecting with the additional event-capture module. The GPIO module is synthesized by SMIC O.13um technology library and integrated in a SOC.