Rainbow Electronics ATmega64L - Manual (Page 10)

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ATmega16(L)
2466B–09/01
Stack Pointer The stack is mainly used for storing temporary data, for storing local variables and for
storing return addresses after interrupts and subroutine calls. The stack pointer register
always points to the top of the stack. Note that the stack is implemented as growing from
higher memory locations to lower memory locations. This implies that a stack PUSH
command decreases the stack pointer.
The Stack Pointer points to the data SRAM stack area where the Subroutine and Inter-
rupt Stacks are located. This Stack space in the data SRAM must be defined by the
program before any subroutine calls are executed or interrupts are enabled. The Stack
Pointer must be set to point above $60. The Stack Pointer is decremented by one when
data is pushed onto the Stack with the PUSH instruction, and it is decremented by two
when the return address is pushed onto the Stack with subroutine call or interrupt. The
Stack Pointer is incremented by one when data is popped from the Stack with the POP
instruction, and it is incremented by two when data is popped from the Stack with return
from subroutine RET or return from interrupt RETI.
The AVR Stack Pointer is implemented as two 8-bit registers in the I/O space. The num-
ber of bits actually used is implementation dependent. Note that the data space in some
implementations of the AVR architecture is so small that only SPL is needed. In this
case, the SPH register will not be present.
Instruction Execution
Timing This section describes the general access timing concepts for instruction execution. The
AVR CPU is driven by the CPU clock clk
CPU
, directly generated from the selected clock
source for the chip. No internal clock division is used.
Figure 6 shows the parallel instruction fetches and instruction executions enabled by the
Harvard architecture and the fast-access Register file concept. This is the basic pipelin-
ing concept to obtain up to 1 MIPS per MHz with the corresponding unique results for
functions per cost, functions per clocks, and functions per power-unit.
Figure 6. The Parallel Instruction Fetches and Instruction Executions
Figure 7 shows the internal timing concept for the Register file. In a single clock cycle an
ALU operation using two register operands is executed, and the result is stored back to
the destination register.
Bit 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8
SP15 SP14 SP13 SP12 SP11 SP10 SP9 SP8 SPH
SP7 SP6 SP5 SP4 SP3 SP2 SP1 SP0 SPL
7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
Read/Write R/W R/W R/W R/W R/W R/W R/W R/W
R/W R/W R/W R/W R/W R/W R/W R/W
Initial Value 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
clk
1st Instruction Fetch
1st Instruction Execute
2nd Instruction Fetch
2nd Instruction Execute
3rd Instruction Fetch
3rd Instruction Execute
4th Instruction Fetch
T1 T2 T3 T4
CPU