11
ATmega8A [DATASHEET]
8159E–AVR–02/2013
locations. The Stack Pointer Register always points to the top of the Stack. The Stack Pointer points to the data
SRAM Stack area where the Subroutine and Interrupt Stacks are located. A Stack PUSH command will decrease
the Stack Pointer.
The Stack in the data SRAM must be defined by the program before any subroutine calls are executed or interrupts
are enabled. Initial Stack Pointer value equals the last address of the internal SRAM and the Stack Pointer must be
The AtmelAVR Stack Pointer is implemented as two 8-bit registers in the I/O space. The number 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.
7.5.1
SPH and SPL – Stack Pointer High and Low Register
7.6
Instruction Execution Timing
This section describes the general access timing concepts for instruction execution. The Atmel
AVRCPU 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 7-4 shows the parallel instruction fetches and instruction executions enabled by the Harvard architecture
and the fast-access Register File concept. This is the basic pipelining 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.
Table 7-1.
Stack Pointer instructions
Instruction
Stack pointer
Description
PUSH
Decremented by 1
Data is pushed onto the stack
CALL
ICALL
RCALL
Decremented by 2
Return address is pushed onto the stack with a subroutine call or
interrupt
POP
Incremented by 1
Data is popped from the stack
RET
RETI
Incremented by 2
Return address is popped from the stack with return from
subroutine or return from interrupt
Bit
151413121110
9
8
SP15
SP14
SP13
SP12
SP11
SP10
SP9
SP8
SPH
SP7
SP6
SP5
SP4
SP3
SP2
SP1
SP0
SPL
7
6543210
Read/Write
R/W
Initial Value
0
0000000
0
0000000