Recording the Reset Pin

 

The AVR reset pin has many functions.  In addition to being used as an external reset signal, it can be used for debugWire, and it is used for SPI and for high-voltage programming. Other than for when it is used as an external reset signal, the datasheet specifications are somewhat ambiguous.  I recently started working on an updated firmware for the USBasp, and wanted to find out more details about the SPI programming mode.  The image above is one of many recordings I made from programming tests of AVR MCUs.

When I first started capturing the programming signals, I observed seemingly random patterns on the MISO line before programming was enabled.  Although the datasheet lists the target MISO line as being an output, it only switches to output mode after the first two bytes of the "Programming Enable" instruction, 0xAC 0x53, are received and recognized.  Prior to that the pin floats, and the seemingly random patterns I observed were caused by the signals on the MOSI and SCK lines inducing a voltage on the MISO line.  I enabled the pullup resistor on the programmer side in order to keep the MISO line high until the PE instruction was recognized by the target.

One of the steps in the datasheet's serial programming alorithm that doesn't make sense to me is step 2, which says, "Wait for at least 20 ms and enable Serial Programming by sending the Programming Enable serial instruction to pin MOSI."  It's clear from the capture image above that a wait time of less than 100 us worked in this case.  I did a number of experiments with different targets (t13, t85, m8a) with and without the CKDIV8 fuse set, and found a delay of 64 us was always sufficient.  Nevertheless, I still used a 20 ms delay in the USBasp firmware.

Another observation I made was of a repeatable delay between the 8th rising edge of the SCK signal on the second byte and MISO going low.  After multiple tests, I found that delay is between 2 and 3 of the target clock cyles.  A close-up of the 0x53 byte shows this clearly:

The 2-3 clock ccyle delay seems to correspond with the datasheet's specification of the minimum low and high periods for the SCK signal of 2 clock cycles when the target is running at less than 12Mhz.  However I found I couldn't consistently get a target running at 8MHz to enter programming mode with a SCK clock of 1.5MHz.  Additional logs of the programming sequence revealed something interesting when multiple PE instructions are sent at less than 1/8th of the target clock rate, with a positive pulse on RST for synchronization.  In those sequences, the delay was smaller between the 8th rising edge of the SCK signal on the second byte and MISO going low for the second and subsequent times the PE instruction is sent.  It seems you need to use a slower SCK frequency to get the target into programming mode, but after that, the frequency can be increased to 1/4 of the target clock.

Using what I learned, I have implemented automatic SCK speed negotiation and a higher default SCK clock speed.  The speed negotiation starts with 1.5MHz for SCK, and makes 3 attempts to enter programming mode.  If that fails, the next slower speed (750kHz) is tried three times, and so on until a speed is found where the target responds.  For subsequent communications with the target, the speed is doubled, since the slowest speed is only needed the first time the PE command is received after power-up.  The firmware also supports a maximum SCK frequency of 3MHz, vs 1.5MHz for the original firmware.

The higher speeds don't make a large difference in flash/verify times since the overhead of the vUSB code tends to dominate beyond a SCK frequency of 750kHz or so.  Reading the 8kB of flash on an ATtiny85 takes around 3 seconds.  By optimizing the low-speed USB code, such as was done by Tim with u-wire, it should be possible to double that speed.