TABLE OF CONTENTS The microcontroller market is vast, with over 20 billion devices per year estimated to be shipped in 2010. A bewildering array of vendors, devices, and architectures are competing in this market. The requirement for higher-performance microcontrollers has been driven globally by the industry's changing needs; for example, microcontrollers are required to handle more work without increasing a product's frequency or power. In addition, microcontrollers are becoming increasingly connected, whether by Universal Serial Bus (USB), Ethernet, or Wireless Radio, and hence the processing needed to support these communications channels and advanced peripherals is growing. Similarly, general application complexity is on the increase, driven by more sophisticated user interfaces, multimedia requirements, system speed, and convergence of functionalities.
The ARM Cortex-M3 processor, the first of the Cortex generation of processors released by ARM in 2006, was primarily designed to target the 32-bit microcontroller market. The Cortex-M3 processor provides excellent performance at low gate count and comes with many new features previously available only in high-end processors. The Cortex-M3 addresses the requirements for the 32-bit embedded processor market in the following ways:
Greater performance efficiency, allowing more work to be done without increasing the frequency or power requirements
Low power consumption, enabling longer battery life, especially critical in portable products including wireless networking applications
Enhanced determinism, guaranteeing that critical tasks and interrupts are serviced as quickly as possible but in a known number of cycles
Improved code density, ensuring that code fits in even the smallest memory footprints
