The Microprocessor

Preface

Welcome to “The Microprocessor: A Practical Introduction.”

This is an entry-level book on microprocessor architecture, with a focus on Arm architecture for Cortex-M processors due to their widespread use in today's microcontrollers. The objective is to build a strong understanding of the core concepts that can serve as a foundation to study more complex processors and systems.

We have used Cortex-M0 processor as an example to explain the underlying concepts. We have chosen it for its simplicity; it allows us to cover all the fundamental concepts without overwhelming readers with complex details. Cortex-M0 has a small instruction set that includes all the key aspects of a typical RISC processor: pipelined execution, arithmetic and logic instructions, load-store and stack operations, and program flow control. It uses an intuitive exception model that remains consistent across all Cortex-M processors. Once learned with Cortex-M0, these same concepts will be applicable while working on more complex processors within Cortex-M family.

We believe that the best way to learn about microprocessor internals is through assembly language programming. Therefore, each chapter is organized as a set of topics, where each topic describes one basic concept, explains the relevant details from the reference manual, and then provides a programming exercise for clarity.

Subsequently, we introduce C programming and demonstrate how various constructs in C are implemented on the processor. The ...