ARM® Microcontroller Architectures

This chapter talks about the architectures and organizations of most popular embedded systems, including the most updated microcontroller ARM® Cortex®-M4, Tiva^TMTM4C123GH6PM MCU, Tiva for C Series LaunchPad^TMTM4C123GXL evaluation board, and EduBASE ARM®. It first discusses the architecture of the ARM® Cortex®-M4 microcontroller unit (MCU). This includes the architecture of the Cortex®-M4 MCU and the architecture of the ARM® Cortex®-M4 core processor (CPU). Then the external memory architecture is discussed with the interfaces between the Cortex®-M4 MCU and memory (flash memory and static RAM (SRAM)) because the Cortex®-M4 is a special MCU and it does not contain any internal memory. Next, the nested vectored interrupt controller (NVIC) architecture is introduced since this unit is integrated into the MCU chip. The chapter also discusses the debug architecture, which plays a key role in the development of the user programs. Finally, it describes the programmer's model, including the operation modes and states.