EEC 214

Computer
Microprocessor

Lecture 2
 MICROCONTROLLERS AND EMBEDDED PROCESSORS
By microprocessor is meant the general-purpose microprocessors such as Intel’s x86 family
(8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, and the Pentium) or Motorola’s PowerPC family. These
microprocessors contain no RAM, no ROM, and no I/O ports on the chip itself. For this reason,
they are commonly referred to as general-purpose microprocessor.

A microcontroller has a CPU (a microprocessor) in addition to a fixed amount of RAM, ROM,

I/O ports, and a timer all on a single chip.

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 A brief history of the AVR microcontroller
The basic architecture of AVR was designed by two students of Norwegian Institute of
Technology (NTH), Alf-Egil Bogen and Vegard Wollan, and then was bought and developed by
Atmel in 1996.

You may ask what AVR stands for; AVR can have different meanings for different people! Atmel
says that it is nothing more than a product name, but it might stand for Advanced Virtual RISC,
or Alf and Vegard RISC (the names of the AVR designers).

There are many kinds of AVR microcontroller with different properties. Except for AVR32,
which is a 32-bit microcontroller, AVRs are all 8-bit microprocessors, meaning that the CPU can
work on only 8 bits of data at a time. Data larger than 8 bits has to be broken into 8-bit pieces to
be processed by the CPU.

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 AVR features
The AVR is an 8-bit RISC single-
chip microcontroller with Harvard
architecture that comes with some
standard features such as on-chip
program (code) ROM, data RAM,
data EEPROM, timers and I/O
ports. See Figure 2. Most AVRs
have some additional features like
ADC, PWM, and different kinds
of serial interface such as USART,
SPI, I2C (TWI), CAN, USB, and
so on. See Figures 3 and 4.

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 AVR features

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 AVR features

Most of the AVRs come with ADC (analog-to-digital converter), timers, and USART (Universal
Synchronous Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter) as standard peripherals. The ADC is 10-bit
and the number of ADC channels in AVR chips varies and can be up to 16, depending on the
number of pins in the package. The AVR can have up to 6 timers besides the watchdog timer. The
USART peripheral allows us to connect the AVR-based system to serial ports such as the COM
port of the x86 IBM PC. Most of the AVR family members come with the I2C and SPI buses and
some of them have USB or CAN bus as well.

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 AVR features

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 AVR features

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 AVR features

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 Other microcontrollers

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 THE GENERAL PURPOSE REGISTERS IN the AVR

AVR microcontrollers have many registers for arithmetic and logic operations. In the CPU,
registers are used to store information temporarily. That information could be a byte of data to be
processed, or an address pointing to the data to be fetched. The vast majority of AVR registers are
8-bit registers. In the AVR there is only one data type: 8-bit. The 8 bits of a register are shown in
the diagram below. These range from the MSB (most-significant bit) D7

In AVR there are 32 general purpose registers. They are R0–R31 and are
located in the lowest location of memory address.

See Figure 1.

All of these registers are 8 bits.

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 THE AVR DATA MEMORY

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 THE AVR DATA MEMORY

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 THE AVR DATA MEMORY

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR ARCHITECTURE AND ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE

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 AVR status register
The flag register in the AVR is called the status register (SReg).

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 AVR status register

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 ADD instruction and the status register

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 ADD instruction and the status register

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 ADD instruction and the status register

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 ADD instruction and the status register

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 Not all instructions affect the flags

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 Flag bits and decision making
There are instructions that will make a conditional jump (branch) based on the status of the flag
bits. Table 5 provides some of these instructions.

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