Microchip Technology MA180025 Data Sheet

DS39933D-page 146

 2010 Microchip Technology Inc.

12.3.2

TIMER1 OSCILLATOR LAYOUT 
CONSIDERATIONS

The Timer1 oscillator circuit draws very little power
during operation. Due to the low-power nature of the
oscillator, it may also be sensitive to rapidly changing
signals in close proximity.
The oscillator circuit, shown in Figure 12-3, should be
located as close as possible to the microcontroller.
There should be no circuits passing within the oscillator
circuit boundaries other than V

SS

 or V

DD

. 

If a high-speed circuit must be located near the oscilla-
tor (such as the CCP1 pin in Output Compare or PWM
mode, or the primary oscillator using the OSC2 pin), a
grounded guard ring around the oscillator circuit, as
shown in Figure 12-4, may be helpful when used on a
single-sided PCB or in addition to a ground plane.

The TMR1 register pair (TMR1H:TMR1L) increments
from 0000h to FFFFh and rolls over to 0000h. The
Timer1 interrupt, if enabled, is generated on overflow
which is latched in interrupt flag bit, TMR1IF
(PIR1<0>). This interrupt can be enabled or disabled
by setting or clearing the Timer1 Interrupt Enable bit,
TMR1IE (PIE1<0>).

If CCP1 or CCP2 is configured to use Timer1 and to
generate a Special Event Trigger in Compare mode
(CCPxM<3:0> = 1011), this signal will reset Timer3.
The trigger from CCP2 will also start an A/D conversion
if the A/D module is enabled (see Section 16.3.4
“Special Event Trigger” for more information).
The module must be configured as either a timer or a
synchronous counter to take advantage of this feature.
When used this way, the CCPRxH:CCPRxL register
pair effectively becomes a period register for Timer1. 
If Timer1 is running in Asynchronous Counter mode,
this Reset operation may not work.
In the event that a write to Timer1 coincides with a
Special Event Trigger, the write operation will take
precedence.

Adding an external LP oscillator to Timer1 (such as the
one described in Section 12.3 “Timer1 Oscillator”)
gives users the option to include RTC functionality to
their applications. This is accomplished with an
inexpensive watch crystal to provide an accurate time
base and several lines of application code to calculate
the time. When operating in Sleep mode and using a
battery or supercapacitor as a power source, it can
completely eliminate the need for a separate RTC
device and battery backup.
The application code routine, RTCisr, shown in
Example 12-1, demonstrates a simple method to
increment a counter, at one-second intervals, using an
Interrupt Service Routine. Incrementing the TMR1
register pair to overflow, triggers the interrupt and calls
the routine which increments the seconds counter by
one. Additional counters for minutes and hours are
incremented as the previous counter overflows.
Since the register pair is 16 bits wide, counting up to
overflow the register directly from a 32.768 kHz clock
would take 2 seconds. To force the overflow at the
required one-second intervals, it is necessary to pre-
load it. The simplest method is to set the MSb of
TMR1H with a BSF instruction. Note that the TMR1L
register is never preloaded or altered; doing so may
introduce cumulative error over many cycles.
For this method to be accurate, Timer1 must operate in
Asynchronous mode and the Timer1 overflow interrupt
must be enabled (PIE1<0> = 1) as shown in the
routine, RTCinit. The Timer1 oscillator must also be
enabled and running at all times.

Note: Not drawn to scale.

The Special Event Triggers from the CCPx
module will not set the TMR1IF interrupt
flag bit (PIR1<0>).