Subject : Embedded Systems Design

Topic : Embedded Hardware and Design

Difficulty level : Medium

• Cortex M3 processor is designed with various features to allow designers to develop low power applications and products.
• It has 2 modes- Sleep mode and deep sleep mode: To reduce Power consumption during idle period.
• Low Gate count and design techniques: Reduces circuit activities in processor to allow active power to be decreased.
• High Code density: The code is smaller, program size is reduced. Therefore occupies less memory and power consumption is reduced.
• Smaller codes result in reduced processing time therefore processor into sleep mode as soon as possible cut down energy use.
• It has a 3 stage pipelining with branched speculation.
• 32 bit hardware multiplier with 32bit or 64 bit result.
• It has around 240 interrupt and NMI that can be prioritized. Interrupt latency reduced to 12 cycles.
• It also has a powerful Thumb instruction set.