DMA controller and event system

Traditionally, CPU task is to move data to or from

a peripheral or memory. The more data there is to

movefrom A to B, the more CPU cycles are needed.

But there are alternatives. With AVR picoPower®

technology, a direct memory access controller can perform this task much more energy efficiently by allowing the CPU to sleep and conserve power.

With the DMA controller, data in an Atmel AVR microcontroller can be moved from A to B without involving the CPU at all. The CPU can be put into a sleep mode while the data is being moved to save power or used for other tasks such as computations.

This results in a higher system performance, and

allows the microcontroller to go into a sleep mode

more often to save more power.

The Atmel AVR microcontroller’s event system

allows peripherals to make intelligent decisions and pass data directly to other peripherals. A dedicated routing network is used to transmit the data, and it is totally independent of the CPU. This network offloads

the CPU and can be utilized in sleep modes. System performance is increased while power consumption is lowered. In addition, it is 100 percent deterministic and perfectly suited for real-time applications.

With the DMA controller and event system, less time is spent moving data and more time can be spent in sleep mode, enabling the Atmel AVR microcontroller's low-power features to be used even more often.