ARM Overview

ARM - Advanced RISC Machines

headquarters : Cambridge UK    Company ARM Holdings

ARM does not manufacture Silicon.

ARM produce intellectual property, design tools ( Keil ARM ).

The company designs the core and licenses it to manufacturers like ST or NXP, Apple, Samsung, etc...

This means that the manufacturer can spend time on making the on-chip peripherals powerful and reliable while 
ARM deals with things like power efficiency and instruction set design. On top of this, if the manufacturer 
follows the CMSIS guidelines, porting software between chips from different manufacturers is a piece of cake.

http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp  contains technical publications
http://www.electroons.com/blog/2013/01/a-few-words-about-arm-architecture/
http://www.doulos.com/knowhow/arm/          training
http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dai0234a/index.html      Infocenter - Tutorial Help
http://www.arm.com/support/university/index.php
http://community.arm.com/docs/DOC-7809
http://siwawi.bauing.uni-kl.de/avr_projects/arm_projects/index.html   ARM-Projects

General
RISC-based embedded processors communicate with external hardware using two simple instructions:
– Load Operation :      Copies a word of data from a specific address to a local register
– Store Operation :     Copies a word of data from a local register to a specific address
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DataPath
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Pipeline

 

 

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ARM Architecture Fundamentals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqPJGnBPMM

 

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Core ARM Cortex-M4F

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CoreSight

The industry namefor on-chip debug and trace.

ARM has defined an open CoreSight architecture to allow SoC designers to add debug & trace capabilities for other IP cores in to the CoreSight infrastructure.

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Program Status Register (PSR)

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Bus Arquitectures

AMBA is a registered trademark of ARM Limited.

Modern embedded systems have multiple busses.

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The primary goal of a simple system bus is to allow software (running on a processor) to communicate with other hardware in the SoC. There are many different implementation … but they are all very similar.

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AMBA – Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture

Created by ARM to enable standardized interfaces to their embedded processors

Actually three standards: APB, AHB, and AXI

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– Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB)      –      complex bus

– Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB)      –      simple bus

– Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI)      –       NoC – Network on chip

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