Chapter 1 - Introduction

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the microcontroller: the ARM Cortex-M3 processor. The requirement for higher performance microcontrollers has been driven globally by the industry's changing needs; microcontrollers are required to handle more work without increasing a product's frequency or power. The ARM Cortex-M3 processor, the first of the Cortex generation of processors released by ARM in 2006, was primarily designed to target the 32-bit microcontroller market. The Cortex-M3 processor provides excellent performance at low gate count and comes with many new features available only in high-end processors. The Cortex-M3 processor builds on the success of the ARM7 processor to deliver devices that are significantly easier to program and debug and yet deliver a higher processing capability. Additionally, the Cortex-M3 processor introduces a number of features and technologies that meet the specific requirements of the microcontroller applications, such as nonmaskable interrupts for critical tasks, highly deterministic nested vector interrupts, atomic bit manipulation, and an optional memory protection unit. Furthermore, the processor's low power and high efficiency, coupled with Thumb-2 instructions for bit-field manipulation, make the Cortex-M3 ideal for many communications applications, such as Bluetooth and ZigBee. These factors make the Cortex-M3 processor attractive to existing ARM processor users as well as many new users considering the use of 32-bit MCUs in their products.