8.10 Instruction Execution Timing

This section describes the general access timing concepts for instruction execution. The AVR CPU is driven by the CPU clock clk_CPU, directly generated from the selected clock source for the chip. No internal clock division is used. The Figure below 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.

The following Figure shows the internal timing concept for the Register File. In a single clock cycle an ALU operation using two register operands is executed, and the result is stored back to the destination register.