By
Andrew Sloss, ARM, Los Gatos, CA
Dominic Symes, ARM, Cambridge, UK
Chris Wright, Ultimodule Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Description
Over the last ten years, the ARM architecture has become one of the most pervasive architectures in the world, with more than 2 billion
ARM-based processors embedded in products ranging from cell phones to automotive braking systems. A world-wide community of ARM developers
in semiconductor and product design companies includes software developers, system designers and hardware engineers. To date no book
has directly addressed their need to develop the system and software for an ARM-based system. This text fills that gap.
This book
provides a comprehensive description of the operation of the ARM core from a developer’s perspective with a clear emphasis on software.
It demonstrates not only how to write efficient ARM software in C and assembly but also how to optimize code. Example code throughout
the book can be integrated into commercial products or used as templates to enable quick creation of productive software.
The book
covers both the ARM and Thumb instruction sets, covers Intel's XScale Processors, outlines distinctions among the versions of the ARM
architecture, demonstrates how to implement DSP algorithms, explains exception and interrupt handling, describes the cache technologies
that surround the ARM cores as well as the most efficient memory management techniques. A final chapter looks forward to the future of
the ARM architecture considering ARMv6, the latest change to the instruction set, which has been designed to improve the DSP and media
processing capabilities of the architecture.
Audience:
two key audiences for the book: ARM partners, the semi-conductor companies that design chips using the ARM architecture; and product design
companies (perhaps a division within the semi-conductor companies), the companies that use the resulting chip in a product design, such
as a PDA.
