Introduction to Microcontrollers and This Book

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in this book, which concentrates on a typical and popular ARM® Cortex®-M4 microcontroller unit (MCU) system built by Texas Instruments^TM called TM4C123GXL, in which two ARM® Cortex®-M4 MCUs, TM4C123GH6PM, are utilized. The related development tools and kits can be categorized into two parts, namely the hardware part and the software part. To assist users to build professional microcontroller application projects, some useful development tools and kits are involved in the book to enable users to develop specific implementations easier and faster. The chapter looks at the structure and configuration of a microcontroller or a microcomputer system. A microcontroller can be built by combining three basic components with three system buses. Three components are center processing unit (CPU), memory, and I/O ports. These three components are connected with three system buses, namely address bus (A.B.), data bus (D.B.) and control bus (C.B.).