Implementation of Area and Power Optimised ARM Cortex-M Cores on FPGA

The ARM Cortex-M series of cores incorporate a variety of configurable performance preferences, which help the designers to use desired cores for their applications. Although it is much more common to find ARM Cortex-M cores implemented in Microcontroller Units (MCUs) with memories, clocks and peripherals integrated within the MCU, FPGA implementation of ARM Cortex-M as a soft core can be used to design optimised cores. The ARM DesignStart program provides the CPU and Physical IP solutions that have enabled thousands of organisations worldwide to access, assess, and create System on Chips (SoCs) with ARM IPs. This paper reports the optimisation of the ARM Cortex-M1 and -M3 cores for area and power metrics. The designed cores have been tested for the Digilent Arty A7 FPGA platform. The results report an 8% and 24% reduction in LUT utilisation for Cortex-M1 and -M3 cores, respectively. In addition, the power consumption of the Cortex-M1 and -M3 cores decreases by 25% and 5%, respectively. These results justify using the optimised cores for resource-constrained IoT applications and help designers build power and area-efficient SoCs for low-end devices. Furthermore, the Cortex M-23 and Cortex M-33 cores have been implemented on ARM V2M MPS and tested for secure and non-secure modes in the Keil MDK software development platform.