CyberResearch cpex cel-24-x Manuale Utente

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CyberResearch
® 
CPU Cards 
 
CPEX Series 
CyberResearch, Inc.  
53 
25 Business Park Drive 
 
P: (203) 483-8815; F: (203) 483-9024 
Branford, CT USA 
 
www.cyberresearch.com 
Appendix A  Watchdog Timer 
The Watchdog Timer is provided to ensure that standalone systems can always 
recover from catastrophic conditions that cause the CPU to crash. This condition 
may have occurred by external EMI or a software bug. When the CPU stops working 
correctly, Watchdog Timer will either perform a hardware reset (cold boot) or a 
Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) to bring the system back to a known state.   
 
A BIOS function call (INT 15H) is used to control the Watchdog Timer: 
 
INT 15H: 
           
AH – 6FH 
Sub-function: 
AL – 2: Set the Watchdog Timer’s period 
BL      : Time-out value(Its unit--second is 
dependent on the item “Watchdog 
Timer unit select” in CMOS setup). 
 
You have to call sub-function 2 to set the time-out period of Watchdog Timer first. If 
the time-out value is not zero, the Watchdog Timer will start counting down. While 
the timer value reaches zero, the system will reset. To ensure that this reset 
condition does not occur, calling sub-function 2 must periodically refresh the 
Watchdog Timer. However, the Watchdog timer will be disabled if you set the 
time-out value to be zero. 
 
A tolerance of at least 10% must be maintained to avoid unknown routines 
within the operating system (DOS), such as disk I/O that can be very 
time-consuming.  
 
Note: When exiting a program it is necessary to disable the Watchdog Timer, 
otherwise the system will reset. 
Example program: 
 
INITIAL TIMER PERIOD COUNTER 

W_LOOP: