Atmel AVR instruction set

In addition to these 32 general-purpose registers, the CPU has a few special-purpose registers:

• PC: 16- or 22-bit program counter
• SP: 8- or 16-bit stack pointer
• SREG: 8-bit status register
• RAMPX, RAMPY, RAMPZ, RAMPD and EIND: 8-bit segment registers that are prepended to 16-bit addresses in order to form 24-bit addresses; only available in parts with large address spaces.

The status register bits are:

0. C Carry flag. This is a borrow flag on subtracts. The INC and DEC instructions do not modify the carry flag, so they may be used to loop over multi-byte arithmetic operations.[1]
1. Z Zero flag. Set to 1 when an arithmetic result is zero.
2. N Negative flag. Set to a copy of the most significant bit of an arithmetic result.
3. V Overflow flag. Set in case of two's complement overflow.
4. S Sign flag. Unique to AVR, this is always N⊕V, and shows the true sign of a comparison.
5. H Half-carry flag. This is an internal carry from additions and is used to support BCD arithmetic.
6. T Bit copy. Special bit load and bit store instructions use this bit.
7. I Interrupt flag. Set when interrupts are enabled.

Beginning with the original "classic" core, enhancements are organized into the following levels, each of which includes all the preceding:

1. The "Classic" core has only the zero-operand form of the LPM instruction, which is equivalent to LPM r0,Z.
2. "Classic plus" adds the MOVW instruction for moving register pairs, and the more general form of the LPM instruction (LPM Rd,Z and LPM Rd,Z+) which permit an arbitrary destination register and auto-increment of the Z pointer.
3. "Enhanced" cores add the multiply instructions.
4. The XMEGA cores do not add new instructions per se, but make some significant changes:
   • The memory map is reorganized, eliminating memory-mapping of the processor register file (so I/O ports begin at RAM address 0) and expanding the I/O port range. Now the first 4K is special function registers, the second 4K is data flash, and normal RAM begins at 8K.
   • It is not necessary to explicitly disable interrupts before adjusting the stack pointer registers (SPL and SPH); any write to SPL automatically disables interrupts for 4 clock cycles to give time for SPH to be updated.
   • Other multi-byte registers are provided with shadow registers to enable atomic read and write. When the lowest-order byte is read, the higher-order bytes are copied to the shadow registers, so reading them later produces a snapshot of the register at the time of the first read. Writes to low-order bytes are buffered until the highest-order byte is written, upon which the entire multi-byte register is updated atomically.
5. Later XMEGA cores (specifically, the B, C, and AU models such as the ATxmega16A4U, but not the earlier A, D and E models such as the ATxmega16D4) add four atomic read-modify-write instructions: exchange (XCH), load-and-set, load-and-clear, and load-and-toggle. These help coordinate with direct memory access peripherals, notably a USB controller.

Less capable than the "classic" CPU cores are two subsets: the "AVR1" core, and the "AVR tiny". Confusingly, "ATtiny" branded processors have a variety of cores, including AVR1 (ATtiny11, ATtiny28), classic (ATtiny22, ATtiny26), classic+ (ATtiny24) and AVRtiny (ATtiny20, ATtiny40).

The AVR1 subset was not popular and no new models have been introduced since 2000. It omits all RAM except for the 32 registers mapped at address 0–31 and the I/O ports at addresses 32–95. The stack is replaced by a 3-level hardware stack, and the PUSH and POP instructions are deleted. All 16-bit operations are deleted, as are IJMP, ICALL, and all load and store addressing modes except indirect via Z.

A second, more successful attempt to subset the AVR instruction set is the "AVR tiny" core.

The most significant change is that the AVRtiny core omits registers R0–R15. The registers are also not memory-mapped, with I/O ports from 0–63 and general-purpose RAM beginning at address 64. The 16-bit arithmetic operations (ADIW, SBIW) are omitted, as are the load/store with displacement addressing modes (Y+d, Z+d), but the predecrement and postincrement addressing modes are retained. The LPM instruction is omitted; instead program ROM is mapped to the data address space and may be accessed with normal load instructions.

Finally, the AVRtiny core deletes the 2-word LDS and STS instructions for direct RAM addressing, and instead uses the opcode space previously assigned to the load/store with displacement instructions for new 1-word LDS and STS instructions which can access the first 128 locations of general-purpose RAM, addresses 0x40 to 0xBF. (The IN and OUT instructions provide direct access to I/O space from 0 to 0x3F.)

The smallest cores have ≤256 bytes of data address space (meaning ≤128 bytes of RAM after I/O ports and other reserved addresses are removed) and ≤8192 bytes (8 KiB) of program ROM. These have only an 8-bit stack pointer (in SPL), and only support the 12-bit relative jump/call instructions RJMP/RCALL. (Because the AVR program counter counts 16-bit words, not bytes, a 12-bit offset is sufficient to address 2¹³ bytes of ROM.)

Additional memory addressing capabilities are present as required to access available resources:

1. Models with >256 bytes of data address space (≥256 bytes of RAM) have a 16-bit stack pointer, with the high half in the SPH register.
2. Models with >8 KiB of ROM add the 2-word (22-bit) JUMP and CALL instructions. (Some early models suffer an erratum if a skip instruction is followed by a 2-word instruction.)
3. Models with >64 KiB of ROM add the ELPM instruction and corresponding RAMPZ register. LPM instructions zero-extend the ROM address in Z; ELPM instructions prepend the RAMPZ register for high bits. This is not the same thing as the more general LPM instruction; there exist "classic" models with only the zero-operand form of ELPM (ATmega103 and at43usb320). When auto-increment is available (most models), it updates the entire 24-bit address including RAMPZ.
4. (Rare) models with >128 KiB of ROM have a 3-byte program counter. Subroutine calls and returns use an additional byte of stack space, there is a new EIND register to provide additional high bits for indirect jumps and calls, and there are new extended instructions EIJMP and EICALL which use EIND:Z as the destination address. (The previous IJMP and ICALL instructions use zero-extended Z.)
5. (Rare) models with >64 KiB of RAM address space extend the 16-bit RAM addressing limits with RAMPX, RAMPY, RAMPZ and RAMPD registers. These provide additional high bits for addressing modes which use the X, Y, or Z register pairs, respectively, or the direct addressing instructions LDS/STS. Unlike ROM access, there are no distinct "extended" instructions; instead the RAMP registers are used unconditionally.

Three instructions are present only on models which have the corresponding hardware facility

• SPM for storing to flash ROM, is present only on processors with flash ROM (most of them)
• BREAK for invoking the on-chip debugger, is omitted on some small models without on-chip debugger support
• DES for performing Data Encryption Standard rounds, is present on XMEGA models with DES accelerator support

Architectures other than AVR1 are named according to avr-libc conventions.[2]

^a Reduced register set is limited to R16 through R31.[1]