Component is the essential encapsulation of functionality. For instance, the TimerInt component encapsulates all processor resources that provide timing and hardware interrupts on the processor.
You will find many components that are called embedded components in the Processor Expert Components library window. These components are designed to cover the most commonly required functionality used for the microcontroller applications, such as from handling port bit operations, external interrupts, and timer modes up to serial asynchronous/synchronous communications, A/D converter, I2C, and CAN.
By setting properties, you can define the behavior of the component in runtime. You can control properties in design time by using the Component Inspector. Runtime control of the component function is done by the methods. Events are interfacing hardware or software events invoked by the component to the user's code.
You can enable or disable the appearance (and availability) of methods of the component in generated source code. Disabling unused methods could make the generated code shorter. For more details, see General Optimizations topic.
Events, if used, can be raised by interrupt from the hardware resource such as timer, SIO or by software reason, such as overflow in application runtime. You can enable or disable interrupts using component methods and define priority for event occurrence and for executing its Interrupt Service Routine (ISR). The hardware ISR provided by the component handles the reason for the interrupt. If the interrupt vector is shared by two (or more) resources, then this ISR provides the resource identification and you are notified by calling the user event handling code.