ARM Microcontroller tutorial | Cortex-M0,Cortex-M3 series


This tutorial on microcontroller covers following:

About ARM

ARM Holding plc is the leading semiconductor IP supplier in the world. Today almost many of the digital electronic products have ARM technology inside. ARM Company licenses their technology to semiconductor manufacturers and OEMs and hence ARM succeeds in the fast changing business strategies of today. ARM based chips developed by semiconductor companies goes into mobile devices such as smart phones and also into home digital electronics which include digital TVs, hard disk drives, washing machines and more.

Microcontrollers from ARM

Cortex M-Series is the latest range of microcontroller cores from ARM which provides high performance, low cost and low power due to 32 bit RISC processors. ARM Cortex M3 and Cortex-M0 processor based MCU is most popular now-days due to its 32 bit architecture and other features as listed below. We will see features of Cortex-M3 compare to 8051 series of microcontroller architecture developed by Intel.

ARM Cortex-M3 MCU features

• Cortex-M3 is ARM processor designed mainly for microcontroller applications.

•  Architecture- ARMv7-M (Harvard)

• ISA Support- Thumb® or Thumb-2

• Pipeline- 3-stage + branch speculation

•  Dhrystone- 1.25 DMIPS/MHz(Performance Efficiency)

• Memory Protection- Optional 8 region MPU with sub regions and background region

• Interrupts- Non maskable Interrupt, 1 to 240 physical interrupts

•  Interrupt latency- 12 Cycles

• Interrupt Priority Levels- 8 to 256 priority levels

• Wake-up Interrupt Controller- Up to 240 Wake-up Interrupts

• Sleep Modes- Integrated WFI and WFE Instructions and Sleep On Exit capability. Sleep & Deep Sleep Signals.

• Bit Manipulation- Integrated Instructions & Bit Banding

• Power consumption-0.19mW/MHz

• Enhanced Instructions- Hardware Divide (2 to 12 Cycles), Single Cycle (32 X 32) Multiply, Saturated Math Support.

• Debug- Optional JTAG & Serial Wire Debug Ports. Up to 8 Breakpoints and 4 Watchpoints.

• Trace- Optional Instruction Trace , Data Trace , and Instrumentation Trace


Cortex-M3 Technical Manual

infocenter.arm.com