Posted on September 19, 2012 at 01:46You have correctly named it, but it's basically the memory-to-memory, or peripheral, transfer that occurs autonomous of the CPU core.
For the TIM units you have a couple of ways to interact with DMA, one of them is to pace the transfers for another peripheral, say sampling an ADC, or playing back audio to a DAC. These DMA events would occur at regular intervals without any interrupt or processor loading, except in the middle or end of the transfer. This being particularly advantageous with high rates which would saturate the CPU.
You can also use DMA to read in new register settings into the timer itself, including burst settings of multiple registers, in order. This for example could be used to automate waveform generation, bysay having a sequence of period and width settings for a PWM. These could be set up ahead of time, or looped, and read in at the Update event, etc.
