Architectures and Processors blog

In order to keep my assembly-related documents easy to read and understand, I've written some macros for the GNU-assembler (also known as GAS).

The beginning of a year brings with it the potential of many new things; resolutions, good habits and of course the new gadgets that promise to change our lives at CES. Amidst the glitz of promises of…

The Arm architecture continues to evolve and Armv8.2-A is the second set of changes being introduced to the Armv8-A architecture profile.

Hello everyone, I would like to know why you are using Cortex-M microcontroller. Why don't you adopt other microcontrollers such as 8-bit, 16-bit or MIPS or x86? The background is that I plan to write…

The most appropriate method of implementing push and pop operations depends on the nature of the engine used. I consider a number of possible solutions for the AArch64 port of Google V8 JavaScript engine…

ARM TrustZone CryptoCellCryptoCell is a range of security sub-systems and hardware components that provide platform level security as well as hardware support for security acceleration and offloading.CryptoCell…

When reading assembly-level code for any of the AArch32 or AArch64 instruction sets, you may have noticed that the stack pointer has various alignment and usage restrictions. These restrictions are part…

ARM introduces TrustZone for ARMv8-M to bring mobile style security to microcontrollers and provides a new family of security subsystems: TrustZone CryptoCell I’m at Techcon in Santa Clara this week and…

The amount of data we generate is growing exponentially. Gartner has predicted that in 2015 the global mobile data traffic will be a total of 52 billion terabytes, an increase of 59 percent on 2014. It…

The announcement of the ARM®Cortex®-A35 processor today marks the beginning of a new family of ultra high efficiency application processors from ARM. So, what are the key features of Cortex-A35 and what…

Semihalf is happy to present the first blog post from the planned series of topics covering interesting facts about porting FreeBSD to Armv8 architecture.

When we look at what’s happening in consumer electronic devices, you can see there is a clear evolution path. The smartphone has become the central computing device for most people and it is now being…

Hi all, I can finally share with you some of the interesting work we have been doing around Cortex-M0 Design Start and FPGA. ARM has re-launched the Cortex-M Design Start program making it more easily…

Android software frequently sags under the sheer weight of all the different devices it’s required to support. This is because developers can’t fine-tune the performance of their apps and games with the…

ARM’s GIC (General Interrupt Controller) architecture provides an efficient and standardized approach for handling interrupts in multi-core ARM based systems.

In a lot of ways debug is similar to being a medical doctor. A patient comes in with some complaints and lists their symptoms, but you need to run tests in order to properly diagnose the issue before focusing…

This is the third in a series of blogs that gives a technical introduction to the ARM CoreSight Debug and Trace technology and architecture.

FreeBSD is an advanced UNIX-based operating system used to power modern servers, desktops and embedded platforms. The FreeBSD community has had support for 32-bit ARM for some time, and is now looking…

I'm doing a series of blogs that give a technical introduction into ARM CoreSight debug and trace technology. The ETM and PTM trace units are trace sources that monitor ARM processors.

Debug can be a pain. At the best of times it's a nuisance and in the worst case scenario a complex web of wires that need to be configured properly to diagnose and solve SoC design problems.

IP integration is increasingly seen as a key challenge in SoC development. Increased system complexity, IP reuse, IP configurability and tightly-bound schedules have all combined to break traditional flows…