KL03Z: HwTimer?

[sarastout-grand]

Hello,

I've been reading in the Arm documentation about the SysTick timer associated with the Cortex M0+. I do not find anything about this timer in the KL03Z user manual. There appears to be an nxp demo for a HwTimer which I assume is the SysTick.

How come there is nothing in the user's manual about this timer? Do people generally not use this timer? What is it's purpose?

Thanks,

Sara

[mjbcswitzerland · Accepted solution]

Sara

The SysTick is a part of the Cortex-M0+ core and so is not chip specific - for details of the Cortex core you generally need to use ARM documents. For SysTick: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dai0179b/ar01s02s08.html

The SysTick is use by most firmware or OS to generate the system tick timer interrupt (hence the name and the fact that it is always there in the core). It is also interesting because the same code will run on all Cortex parts (irrespective of processor and manufacturer).
The KL03 has otherwise 2 TPM modules (each with 2 channels) that can also be used for HW timers. A low power timer (LPTMR) and RTC (real time clock). The KL03 is one of the only Kinetis chips that has no PIT, which is otherwise a very simple but power-ful timer (32 bits rather than the 16 bits in the TPM).

Regards

Mark