ARMv8-M

Kicking off today in Santa Clara, California is ARM’s annual developer conference and expo, TechCon. Although ARM announces products year-round, they always have a couple of announcements reserved for TechCon and this year is no exception. Being unveiled at 2015’s show is the ARM Cortex-A35 CPU and the ARMv8-M instruction set architecture, the latter being the focus of this article. As a brief bit of background since we don’t extensively cover ARM’s microcontroller efforts, in recognition of the unique power and performance requirements for microcontrollers, ARM produces a separate instruction set architecture and lineup of CPU cores specifically for these kinds of products. These are the ARM-M ISAs and the Cortex-M series of CPUs respectively. The ARM-M ISAs can be thought of as a cut-down...