ARM® Microcontroller Software and Instruction Set

This chapter provides general information about the ARM® Cortex ® -M4 microcontroller software and instruction set. It first introduces ARM® Cortex ® -M4 Assembly instruction and then discusses the related C codes with some necessary peripheral device driver libraries provided by the vendor. There are about 203 instructions in the ARM® Cortex ® -M4 instruction set excluding the FPU related instructions. The user's source codes developed by assembly language must follow certain rules and meet some requirements to enable the assembler to correctly convert them to the target or object codes. Generally each user's instruction in the user's source code file is composed of four fields: Label field, Operation field, Operands field and Comment field. Pseudo instructions are very useful to help users to build and develop their application programs by providing more controls and managements to the memory space, variables, and constants used in the program.