Beginners guide to the ARM Cortex-M series processors

9th August 2012

ARM Ltd

ES Admin

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If you are yet to employ what is rapidly becoming the most widely deployed architecture in the (albeit relatively short) history of electronic engineering, here’s a beginner’s guide to the ARM Cortex-M series processors, including why you don’t need to be an expert to use one. By Joseph Yiu

There are currently at least 15 microcontroller vendors shipping ARM microcontroller products and at least another ten semiconductor companies shipping ASICs or SoCs containing Cortex-M processors. Considering that the first Cortex-M processor was released only six years ago, this is a considerable success. Today, more and more embedded software developers have started to use Cortex-M processor-based microcontrollers and some universities have started to teach Cortex-M processor programming in their engineering courses.

For beginners in embedded software development, stepping into this world could be daunting; there are many different kinds of ARM processor — the largest processor portfolio in the industry — and there are five processors in the Cortex-M series alone! This article explains what these processors are, some of their features and how to get started with software development with the Cortex-M processor-based MCUs.

If this abstract has piqued your interest, read the full article online in the August issue of Electronic Specifier Design, by clicking here.