ATmega8(L)
Data Reception –
The USART
Receiver
The USART Receiver is enabled by writing the Receive Enable (RXEN) bit in the UCSRB Regis-
ter to one. When the Receiver is enabled, the normal pin operation of the RxD pin is overridden
by the USART and given the function as the Receiver’s serial input. The baud rate, mode of
operation and frame format must be set up once before any serial reception can be done. If syn-
chronous operation is used, the clock on the XCK pin will be used as transfer clock.
Receiving Frames with The Receiver starts data reception when it detects a valid start bit. Each bit that follows the start
5 to 8 Data Bits
bit will be sampled at the baud rate or XCK clock, and shifted into the Receive Shift Register until
the first stop bit of a frame is received. A second stop bit will be ignored by the Receiver. When
the first stop bit is received (i.e., a complete serial frame is present in the Receive Shift Regis-
ter), the contents of the Shift Register will be moved into the receive buffer. The receive buffer
can then be read by reading the UDR I/O location.
The following code example shows a simple USART receive function based on polling of the
Receive Complete (RXC) Flag. When using frames with less than eight bits the most significant
bits of the data read from the UDR will be masked to zero. The USART has to be initialized
before the function can be used.
Assembly Code Example(1)
USART_Receive:
; Wait for data to be received
sbis UCSRA, RXC
rjmp USART_Receive
; Get and return received data from buffer
in
r16, UDR
ret
C Code Example(1)
unsigned char USART_Receive( void )
{
/* Wait for data to be received */
while ( !(UCSRA & (1<<RXC)) )
;
/* Get and return received data from buffer */
return UDR;
}
Note:
1. See “About Code Examples” on page 8.
The function simply waits for data to be present in the receive buffer by checking the RXC Flag,
before reading the buffer and returning the value.
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2486T–AVR–05/08
ATMEL [ ATMEL ]
