Edge Triggered Interrupts

An edge-triggered interrupt is a class of interrupts that are signalled by a level transition on the interrupt line, either a falling edge (1 to 0) or a rising edge (0 to 1). A device wishing to signal an interrupt drives a pulse onto the line and then releases the line to its quiescent state. If the pulse is too short to be detected by polled I/O then special hardware may be required to detect the edge. This type of interrupt is useful for a fleeting signal that doesn't last long enough for the processor to recognize it using polled I/O or for when the signal can last a long time, but the significant event is when that signal first goes active.
Edge-triggered interrupt modules can be acknowledged immediately, no matter how the interrupt source behaves. The type of the interrupt source does not matter. It can be a pulse, a firmware-clear signal, or some external signal that eventually is cleared somehow. Edge-triggered interrupts keep firmware’s code complexity down, reduce the number of conditions firmware needs to be aware of, and provide more flexibility when interrupts are acknowledged. This keeps development time down and quality up.
Multiple devices may share an edge-triggered interrupt line if they are designed to. The interrupt line must have a pull-down or pull-up resistor so that when not actively driven it settles to one particular state.Devices signal an interrupt by briefly driving the line to its non-default state, and let the line float (do not actively drive it) when not signaling an interrupt. This type of connection is also referred to as open collector. The line then carries all the pulses generated by all the devices.
Edge-triggered interrupts do not suffer the problems that level-triggered interrupts have with sharing. Service of a low-priority device can be postponed arbitrarily, and interrupts will continue to be received from the high-priority devices that are being serviced. If there is a device that the CPU does not know how to service, it may cause a spurious interrupt, or even periodic spurious interrupts, but it does not interfere with the interrupt signaling of the other devices.