AVR Libc Home Page AVRs AVR Libc Development Pages
Main Page FAQ Library Reference Additional Documentation Example Projects

<util/delay.h>: Busy-wait delay loops

Detailed Description

    #define F_CPU 1000000UL  // 1 MHz
    //#define F_CPU 14.7456E6
    #include <util/delay.h>

Note:
As an alternative method, it is possible to pass the F_CPU macro down to the compiler from the Makefile. Obviously, in that case, no #define statement should be used.
The functions in this header file implement simple delay loops that perform a busy-waiting. They are typically used to facilitate short delays in the program execution. They are implemented as count-down loops with a well-known CPU cycle count per loop iteration. As such, no other processing can occur simultaneously. It should be kept in mind that the functions described here do not disable interrupts.

In general, for long delays, the use of hardware timers is much preferrable, as they free the CPU, and allow for concurrent processing of other events while the timer is running. However, in particular for very short delays, the overhead of setting up a hardware timer is too much compared to the overall delay time.

Two inline functions are provided for the actual delay algorithms.

Two wrapper functions allow the specification of microsecond, and millisecond delays directly, using the application-supplied macro F_CPU as the CPU clock frequency (in Hertz). These functions operate on double typed arguments, however when optimization is turned on, the entire floating-point calculation will be done at compile-time.

Note:
When using _delay_us() and _delay_ms(), the expressions passed as arguments to these functions shall be compile-time constants, otherwise the floating-point calculations to setup the loops will be done at run-time, thereby drastically increasing both the resulting code size, as well as the time required to setup the loops.


Functions

void _delay_loop_1 (uint8_t __count)
void _delay_loop_2 (uint16_t __count)
void _delay_us (double __us)
void _delay_ms (double __ms)

Function Documentation

void _delay_loop_1 (  uint8_t  __count  ) 
 

Delay loop using an 8-bit counter __count, so up to 256 iterations are possible. (The value 256 would have to be passed as 0.) The loop executes three CPU cycles per iteration, not including the overhead the compiler needs to setup the counter register.

Thus, at a CPU speed of 1 MHz, delays of up to 768 microseconds can be achieved.

void _delay_loop_2 (  uint16_t  __count  ) 
 

Delay loop using a 16-bit counter __count, so up to 65536 iterations are possible. (The value 65536 would have to be passed as 0.) The loop executes four CPU cycles per iteration, not including the overhead the compiler requires to setup the counter register pair.

Thus, at a CPU speed of 1 MHz, delays of up to about 262.1 milliseconds can be achieved.

void _delay_ms (  double  __ms  ) 
 

Perform a delay of __ms milliseconds, using _delay_loop_2().

The macro F_CPU is supposed to be defined to a constant defining the CPU clock frequency (in Hertz).

The maximal possible delay is 262.14 ms / F_CPU in MHz.

void _delay_us (  double  __us  ) 
 

Perform a delay of __us microseconds, using _delay_loop_1().

The macro F_CPU is supposed to be defined to a constant defining the CPU clock frequency (in Hertz).

The maximal possible delay is 768 us / F_CPU in MHz.

Automatically generated by Doxygen 1.4.1 on 23 Jan 2006.