AT90S8515

Description

The AT90S8515 is a low-power CMOS 8-bit microcontroller based on the AVR ® enhanced RISC architecture. By executing powerful instructions in a single clock cycle, the AT90S8515 achieves throughputs approaching 1 MIPS per MHz allowing the system designer to optimize power consumption versus processing speed. The AVR core combines a rich instruction set with 32 general purpose working registers. All the 32 registers are directly connected to the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), allowing two independent registers to be accessed in one single instruction executed in one clock cycle. The resulting architecture is more code efficient while achieving throughputs up to ten times faster than conventional CISC microcontrollers.

The device is manufactured using Atmel’s high density non-volatile memory technology. The on-chip in-system programmable Flash allows the program memory to be reprogrammed in-system through an SPI serial interface or by a conventional nonvolatile memory programmer. By combining an enhanced RISC 8-bit CPU with In-System Programmable Flash on a monolithic chip, the Atmel AT90S8515 is a powerful microcontroller that provides a highly flexible and cost effective solution to many embedded control applications.

Architectural Overview

The fast-access register file concept contains 32 x 8-bit general purpose working registers with a single clock cycle access time. This means that during one single clock cycle, one ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) operation is executed. Two operands are output from the register file, the operation is executed, and the result is stored back in the register file - in one clock cycle. Six of the 32 registers can be used as three 16-bits indirect address register pointers for Data Space addressing - enabling efficient address calculations. One of the three address pointers is also used as the address pointer for the constant table look up function. These added function registers are the 16-bits X-register, Y-register and Z-register.
The ALU supports arithmetic and logic functions between registers or between a constant and a register. Single register operations are also executed in the ALU. In addition to the register operation, the conventional memory addressing modes can be used on the register file as well. This is enabled by the fact that the register file is assigned the 32 lowermost Data Space addresses ($00 - $1F), allowing them to be accessed as though they were ordinary memory locations. The I/O memory space contains 64 addresses for CPU peripheral functions as Control Registers, Timer/Counters, A/D-converters, and other I/O functions.

The I/O Memory can be accessed directly, or as the Data Space locations following those of the register file, $20 - $5F. The AVR uses a Harvard architecture concept - with separate memories and buses for program and data. The program memory is executed with a two stage pipeline. While one instruction is being executed, the next instruction is pre-fetched from the program memory. This concept enables instructions to be executed in every clock cycle. The program memory is in-system programmable Flash memory. With the relative jump and call instructions, the whole 4K address space is directly accessed. Most AVR instructions
have a single 16-bit word format. Every program memory address contains a 16- or 32-bit instruction. During interrupts and subroutine calls, the return address program counter (PC) is stored on the stack. The stack is effectively allocated in the general data SRAM, and consequently the stack size is only limited by the total SRAM size and the usage of the SRAM. All user programs must initial size the SP in the reset routine  (before subroutines or interrupts are executed). The 16-bit stack pointer SP is read/write accessible in the I/O space. The 512 bytes data SRAM can be easily accessed through the five different addressing modes supported in the AVR architecture. The memory spaces in the AVR architecture are all linear and regular memory maps. A flexible interrupt module has its control registers in the I/O space with an additional global interrupt enable bit in the status register. All the different interrupts have a separate interrupt vector in the interrupt vector table at the beginning of the program memory. The different interrupts have priority in accordance with their interrupt vector position. The lower the interrupt vector address the higher the priority.

Pinout Diagram AT90S8515

Download Datasheet AT90S8515