Timers And Counters In Microcontroller

Counters and timers in 8051 microcontroller contain two special function registers.

Timers and counters in microcontroller.

The 8051 has two timers. Higher the clock frequency higher will be the processing speed. It counts the cycle of the peripheral clock or an externally supplied clock. Timers t0 and t1 completely fall under the 8051 standard.

In arduino uno it takes 1 16000000 seconds or 62nano seconds to make a single count. A timer uses counter which counts at certain speed depending upon the clock frequency. Tmod is an 8 bit register used for selecting timer or counter and mode of timers. This is responsible for speed.

Timer 0 and timer 1. The figure below shows the prescaler and input selector configuration for a timer counter control registered as used in most avr microcontrollers. Thus one can think of it as. The timer and counter functions in the microcontroller count in sync with the microcontroller clock.

All three can be configured to operate either as timers or event counters. The 8051 has two counters timers which can be used either as timer to generate a time delay or as counter to count events happening outside the microcontroller. However the counter only counts up to to either 256 8 bit counter or 65535 16 bit counter. The timer counter control register tccrx associated with the timer contains the counter select bits csx2 csx1 csx0 that control which input is used with a specific counter.

The 8051 has two timers timer 0 and timer 1. So timer counter is a software designed to count the time interval between events. However the counter can only count up to either 256 8 bit counter or 65535 16 bit counter. Both timer 0 and timer 1 are 16 bit wide.

In the timer mode the register is incremented after every machine cycle. Timer mode control tmod. Since the 8051 follows an 8 bit architecture each 16 bit is accessed as two separate registers of low byte and high byte. The timers and counters in 8051 microcontroller has two 16 bit timer counter registers.

That s far from the 1 000 000 ticks per second that the standard avr microcontroller provides. Tmod timer mode register and tcon timer control register which are used for activating and configuring timers and counters. The 8052 has these two plus one more. Both timers are 16 bits wide.

That is a far cry from the 1 000 000 ticks per second that the standard avr microcontroller provides. Every microcontroller has a clock oscillator say in arduino uno it is 16mhz. The timer and counter functions in the microcontroller simply count in sync with the microcontroller clock. The 16 bit register of timer 0 is accessed as low and high byte.

They can be used as timers or as event counters.