ARM PROCESSORS ARCHITECTURE

PROLOGUE
• The ARM Processor was originally designed at
Acorn Computers Limited of Cambridge, England,
between the years 1983-1985.
• It was the first RISC microprocessor developed for
commercial use and has some significant
differences from subsequent RISC architectures.
• 1990 ARM Limited was established as a separate
company specifically to widen the exploitation of
ARM technology and it is established as a market-
leader for low-power and cost-sensitive embedded
applications.
 contd
• In fact, ARM does not fab the microprocessors. It
is an IP(intellectual property) company that design
systems and give licenses to other companies like,
Intel, Texas Instruments, Samsung etc. purchase
licenses and fabricate the chips.
• The basic reason behind the origin of ARM
processor was, the 16-bit CISC microprocessors
(mostly Intel) that were available during 1983 were
slower than standard memory parts.
• They also had instructions that took many clock
cycles to complete (in some cases, many hundreds
of clock cycles), resulting very long interrupt
latencies.
 contd
• As a result of these limitations with the commercial
microprocessor offerings, the design of a
proprietary microprocessor was considered & hence
ARM chip was emerged.
• The ARM processor is supported by a toolkit
which includes an instruction-set emulator for
hardware modeling and software testing and
benchmarking, an assembler, C and C++ compilers,
a linker and a symbolic debugger.
 contd
• So, ARM is not a Fab company, it only gives
licenses to companies which manufacture ARM
based CPUs or System On Chip products.
• The architecture license enables the licensee to
develop their own processors compliant with ARM
ISA.
• In the present day most popular ARM processor is
RM7TDMI which is popularly known as ARM7.
• Here an interesting thing s to be observed.ARM 7
processor is the family name not the version.AS
shown below ARM7TDMI belongs to ARM v4.
• The version and family
don't sync.
Another interesting thing
is after ARM 11 a new
series of processors by
name Cortex was started.
• These Cortex processors are of three types.Cortex-A,
Cortex-M and Cortex-R.
• Cortex-A means
Cortex Application
Cortex M means
Cortex Microcontroller
And Cortex –R denotes
Cortex Real time.
 ARM 7 TDMI-S
• The ARM7TDMI was introduced in 1995 by ARM
• The ARM7TDMI-S processor is a member of the
ARM family of general-purpose 32-bit
microprocessors.
• T: THUMBMODE(16 bit instruction support).
• D for on-chip Debug support, enabling the
processor to halt in response to a debug request.
• M: enhanced(fast) Multiplier, yield a full 64-bit
result, high performance.
• I: Embedded ICE hardware (In Circuit
emulator).The Embedded ICE macro cell consists
of on-chip logic to support debug operations.
 contd
• S: Synthesizable. What is its meaning?
• In early days ARMs were designed as a hard macro,
i.e the physical design at the transistor layout level,
and the fab companies were taking this fixed
physical block and used to place it into their chip
designs.
• But due to the complexities, a demand increased for
a more flexible and configurable solution, hence
ARM decided to deliver processor designs as a
behavioral description at the "register transfer
level" (RTL) written in a hardware description
language (HDL), typically Verilog HDL.
 contd
• The process of converting this behavioral
description into a physical network of logic gates is
called "synthesis", and several major EDA
companies sell automated synthesis tools for this
purpose.
• A processor design distributed to licensees as an
RTL description (such as ARM7TDMI-S) is
therefore described as "synthesizable“.
 Designer of ARM PROCESSOR
• Sophie Wilson in 1980s, with his colleague Steve Furber
(Author of a very popular the book on ARM” ARM
System-on-Chip Architecture ”) designed the ARM
architecture, a new CPU design that made mobile
computing possible.
• The low-power architecture has become the dominant
architecture in mobile devices as smartphones and tablets,
and has become a significant player in the embedded
system space
 Novel Features
• ARM has many special features that made which
make them most suitable for embedded design.
• The first requirement is high performance and low
power dissipation.
• The performance of a processor is mainly decided
by two factors.
• One is clock frequency(operational frequency )
and the other is the architecture.
• By increasing the clock frequency the performance
can be improved , but it has a limitation
also.Because, with increase of clock frequency the
power dissipation also increases.
 contd
• So, the designers opted a novel design architectures
which reduce the power dissipation and enhance the
performance.
• ARM is basically a RISC architecture processor
which incorporated a number of features from the
Berkeley RISC design.
• A load-store architecture: Only Load /Store
instructions access memory.
• Fixed-length 32-bit instructions: All instructions
have only a fixed length of 32 bits.
• All arithmetic and Logic instructions operate on the
operands in the processor registers. (3-address
instruction formats).
 contd
(i).Conditional execution of Instructions:
All instructions are conditionally executed. i.e an
instruction is executed only if the current values of
the condition code flags .
Ex: ADDNE r1, r2, r3 i.e Add the registers r2 and r3,
if they are not equal and keep the result in the register
r1.
If the condition is not satisfied ,the instruction acts as
a NOP.
 contd
• Another unusual architectural feature is :
Shift Instructions are not provided explicitly in ARM.
However an immediate value or one of the register
operands in Arithmetic, Logic and Move instructions
can be shifted by a prescribed amount before being
used in an operation.
• Consider the following ARM instruction with r1 =
3 and r2 = 5
ADD r0,r1, r2, LSL#3 ; r0= r1 + (8 x r2) which is
r0 = 3+ (8x5) =43
 contd
• ARM was one of the first architectures to implement load-
store multiple instructions.
• These can transfer multiple registers between memory and
processor in a single instruction.
• ARM processor include an inline barrel shifter to pre-
process one of the input registers.
• This barrel shifter helps in executing arithmetic
instructions like multiplication and multiply accumulate
etc.
• The simplicity in architecture reduces the overhead on
each instruction allowing the clock cycles to be shortened.