1.1 About Timers

Generally, the megaAVR® microcontrollers have two 8-bit and one 16-bit timer. A timer with 16-bit resolution is certainly more flexible to use than one with 8-bit resolution. However, the saying “bigger is better” does not necessarily apply to the microcontroller world. For many applications, it is sufficient to have 8-bit resolution. Using a higher resolution means a larger program overhead, which costs processing time and should be avoided in speed optimized code. It also means higher device cost.

Because of the flexibility of the AVR timers, they can be used for different purposes. The number of timers determines the amount of independent configurations. In the following, the different configuration options will be described more closely.