27.2 Module Overview

The Watchdog module (WDT) is designed to give an added level of safety in critical systems, to ensure a system reset is triggered in the case of a deadlock or other software malfunction that prevents normal device operation.

At a basic level, the Watchdog is a system timer with a fixed period; once enabled, it will continue to count ticks of its asynchronous clock until it is periodically reset, or the timeout period is reached. In the event of a Watchdog timeout, the module will trigger a system reset identical to a pulse of the device's reset pin, resetting all peripherals to their power-on default states and restarting the application software from the reset vector.

In many systems, there is an obvious upper bound to the amount of time each iteration of the main application loop can be expected to run, before a malfunction can be assumed (either due to a deadlock waiting on hardware or software, or due to other means). When the Watchdog is configured with a timeout period equal to this upper bound, a malfunction in the system will force a full system reset to allow for a graceful recovery.