System Clock Prescalers and Their Hazards

ENGINEERING PROJECTS

One means of saving power with the attiny13A is by slowing down the clock frequency of the microcontroller. One option of doing this is by using the system clock prescaler. The attiny13A is shipped with running on a 9.6MHz internal RC Oscillator. It has the CKDIV8 fuse set (which provides a system clock prescaler of 8), thus it runs on a frequency of 1.2MHz.

Supposing we want to slow it further, we can set up the CLKPR (Clock Prescale Register) bits for the same. If we set this to a prescaler of 16 for example, the attiny will run at a frequency of 600KHz. However, there is a special write procedure provided for this to prevent unintentional changes:

  1. Write the Clock Prescaler Change Enable (CLKPCE) bit to one and all other bits in CLKPR to zero.
  2. Within four cycles, write the desired value to CLKPS while writing a zero to CLKPCE.

To follow this, our code will be:

// set CLKPCE to 1 and other bits to zero
CLKPR = 0b10000000;
// set prescaler to 256
CLKPR = 0b00001000;

Furthermore, when compiling we have to use the optimization flags -0s, otherwise the process might take more than four cycles. The microcontroller will be running at a clock speed of 37.5KHz after the operation.

Hazards

If successful, however, programming the microcontroller will be difficult. This is because of syncing issues, whereby the microcontroller is significantly slower than the programmer. To fix this you can set the -B flag using avrdude. However, the usbasp programmer I am using does not have this functionality.

To fix this we have to analyze how the microcontroller sets the new frequency. First, the microcontroller will boot up. At this state CLKPR is still its default value. Then the two instructions setting the prescaler are run. This therefore means that if we can find a way to stop those two instructions from running, we can program the microcontroller with another firmware.

IF we activate the RESET pin, before the clock prescaler is set, the chip can be reprogrammed. Connect Ground signal to the RESET pin and then provide power to the programmer (usbasp). This maintains the microcontroller in Reset mode, thus the instructions changing the prescaler are not carried out. Then immediately flash the attiny. If successful, the error will be gone.

Another way to prevent this is to have a considerable delay before the CLKPCE bits are set. This delay allows for reprogramming if necessary.