The Tiva™ C Series microcontrollers builds on this core to bring high-performance 32-bit computing
to cost-conscious applications requiring significant control processing and connectivity capabilities
such as:
■ Low power, hand-held smart devices
■ Gaming equipment
■ Network appliances and switches
■ Home and commercial site monitoring and control
■ Electronic point-of-sale (POS) machines
■ Motion control
■ Medical instrumentation
■ Remote connectivity and monitoring
■ Test and measurement equipment
■ Factory automation
■ Fire and security
■ Smart Energy/Smart Grid solutions
■ Intelligent lighting control
■ Transportation
This chapter provides information on the Tiva™ C Series implementation of the Cortex-M4F
processor, including the programming model, the memory model, the exception model, fault handling,
and power management.
For technical details on the instruction set, see the Cortex™-M4 instruction set chapter in the ARM®
Cortex™-M4 Devices Generic User Guide (literature number ARM DUI 0553A).
2.1 Block Diagram
The Cortex-M4F processor is built on a high-performance processor core, with a 3-stage pipeline
Harvard architecture, making it ideal for demanding embedded applications. The processor delivers
exceptional power efficiency through an efficient instruction set and extensively optimized design,
providing high-end processing hardware including IEEE754-compliant single-precision floating-point
computation, a range of single-cycle and SIMD multiplication and multiply-with-accumulate
capabilities, saturating arithmetic and dedicated hardware division.
To facilitate the design of cost-sensitive devices, the Cortex-M4F processor implements tightly
coupled system components that reduce processor area while significantly improving interrupt
handling and system debug capabilities. The Cortex-M4F processor implements a version of the
Thumb® instruction set based on Thumb-2 technology, ensuring high code density and reduced
program memory requirements. The Cortex-M4F instruction set provides the exceptional performance
expected of a modern 32-bit architecture, with the high code density of 8-bit and 16-bit
microcontrollers.
The Cortex-M4F processor closely integrates a nested interrupt controller (NVIC), to deliver
industry-leading interrupt performance. The TM4C1294NCPDT NVIC includes a non-maskable
interrupt (NMI) and provides eight interrupt priority levels. The tight integration of the processor core
and NVIC provides fast execution of interrupt service routines (ISRs), dramatically reducing interrupt
latency. The hardware stacking of registers and the ability to suspend load-multiple and store-multiple
operations further reduce interrupt latency. Interrupt handlers do not require any assembler stubs
which removes code overhead from the ISRs. Tail-chaining optimization also significantly reduces
the overhead when switching from one ISR to another. To optimize low-power designs, the NVIC
integrates with the sleep modes, including Deep-sleep mode, which enables the entire device to be
rapidly powered down.
81June 18, 2014
Texas Instruments-Production Data
Tiva
™
TM4C1294NCPDT Microcontroller
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