Like any other microprocessor, the 8051 has a flag register to indicate arithmetic conditions such as the carry bit. The flag register in the 8051 is called the program status word (PSW) register. In this section we discuss various bits of this register and provide some examples of how it is altered.

PSW (program status word) register The program status word (PSW) register is an 8-bit register. It is also referred to as the flag register. Although the PSW register is 8 bits wide, only 6 bits of it are used by the 8051. The two unused bits are user-definable flags. Four of the flags are called conditional flags, meaning that they indicate some conditions that result after an instruction is executed. These four are CY (carry), AC (auxiliary carry), P (parity), and OV (overflow).

The bits PSW.3 and PSW.4 are designated as RSO and RSI, respectively, and are used to change the bank registers. They are explained in the next section. The PSW.5 and PSW.l bits are general-purpose status flag bits and can be used by the programmer for any purpose. In other words, they are user definable.

The following is a brief explanation of four of the flag bits of the PSW register. The impact of instructions on these registers is then discussed.

● CY, the carry flag

This flag is set whenever there is a carry out from the D7 bit. This flag bit is affected after an 8-bit addition or subtraction. It can also be set to 1 or 0 directly by an instruction such as “SETB C” and “CLR C” where “SETB C” stands for “set bit carry” and “CLR C” for “clear carry”.

● AC, the auxiliary carry flag

If there is a carry from D3 to D4 during an ADD or SUB operation, this bit is set; otherwise, it is cleared. This flag is used by instructions that perform BCD (binary coded decimal) arithmetic. See Chapter 6 for more information.

● P, the parity flag

The parity flag reflects the number of 1 s in the A (accumulator) register only. If the A register contains an odd number of Is, then P = 1. Therefore, P = 0 if A has an even number of Is.

● OV, the overflow flag

This flag is set whenever the result of a signed number operation is too large, causing the high-order bit to overflow into the sign bit. In general, the carry flag is used to detect errors in unsigned arithmetic operations. The overflow flag is only used to detect errors in signed arithmetic operations.