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Where is ARM Cortex-M3 used?
The Cortex-M3 processor is specifically developed for high-performance, low-cost platforms for a broad range of devices including microcontrollers, automotive body systems, industrial control systems and wireless networking and sensors.
What are the different operating modes in arm?
Operating modes
- User mode is the usual ARM program execution state, and is used for executing most application programs.
- Fast Interrupt (FIQ) mode supports a data transfer or channel process.
- Interrupt (IRQ) mode is used for general-purpose interrupt handling.
What are the features of the Cortex-M3 processor?
At the heart of the Cortex-M3 processor is an advanced 3-stage pipeline core, based on the Harvard architecture, that incorporates many new powerful features such as branch speculation, single cycle multiply and hardware divide to deliver an exceptional Dhrystone benchmark performance of 1.25 DMIPS/MHz.
What kind of memory protection unit does the Cortex M0 have?
Some Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M0+ microcontrollers have bit-band. Memory Protection Unit (MPU): Provides support for protecting regions of memory through enforcing privilege and access rules. It supports up to eight different regions, each of which can be split into a further eight equal-size sub-regions.
Why are Cortex-M cores not included in legacy cores?
The ARM architecture for ARM Cortex-M series removed some features from older legacy cores: The 32-bit ARM instruction set is not included in Cortex-M cores. Endianness is chosen at silicon implementation in Cortex-M cores. Legacy cores allowed “on-the-fly” changing of the data endian mode.
What kind of instruction set does Cortex M support?
Only Thumb-1 and Thumb-2 instruction sets are supported in Cortex-M architectures; the legacy 32-bit ARM instruction set isn’t supported. All Cortex-M cores implement a common subset of instructions that consists of most Thumb-1, some Thumb-2, including a 32-bit result multiply.