Blueprint of Machine’s brain

Van Neumann Architecture

Harvard Architecture


Inventors of Digital Computer

Father of computers - Charles Babbage

  • 1791-1871 George Boole 1815-1864 John von Neumann 1903-1957

Family of ARM Processors

ARM: Advanced RISC Machine

Cortex-M Series

For microcontrollers - e.g. street lamps

Cortex-R Series

For real-time applications - e.g routers

Cortex-A Series

For advanced application - e.g laptops

About ARM cortex

ARM is a RISC architecture

  • ISA stands for Instruction Set Architecture which are innate
  • RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer
  • Most instructions execute in a single cycle
  • ARM Instruction Set is 32-bit
  • Thumb Instruction Set is 16/32-bit

ARM Cortex is a 32-bit load store architecture

  • 8 bit - byte
  • 16 bit - 2 byte - halfword
  • 32 bit - 4 byte - word
  • 64 bit - 8 byte - double-word
  • The only memory accesses are loads and stores

ARM Cortex supports system & user mode

ARM Cortex has over 16 registers

ARM has two internal buses

The ARM Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) is an open-standard, on-chip interconnect specification for the connection and management of functional blocks in system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. It facilitates development of multi-processor designs with large numbers of controllers and peripherals.

ARM Cortex supports Fast Interrupt request (FIQ)

An FIQ is just a higher priority interrupt request, that is prioritized by disabling IRQ and other FIQ handlers during request servicing. Therefore, no other interrupts can occur during the processing of the active FIQ interrupt.

ARM Cortex supports Direct Memory Access (DMA)

Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of microprocessor systems that allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory such as RAM (Random Access Memory) independently of the central processing unit (CPU).

ARM Cortex includes debug port IDE

JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) specifies the use of a dedicated debug port implementing a serial communications interface for low-overhead access without requiring direct external access to the system address and data buses.


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