MCU Development - Endianness - Big Endian

For those of ARM's customers, who design microcontrollers, I would like to recommend a Big Endian implementation (or at least an option to select Big Endian).

This is due to that I have designs that need to work with Big Endian data.

Big Endian is the network native endianness, thus it would be a good optimization for IoT.

In addition, Big Endian is less confusing. Using Big Endian results in fewer programming bugs (bugs that are introduced due to confusion, not necessarily the actual memory organization).

In my case, I would need Big Endian + Network + LCD + 2*I2S + EMC + SD/MMC + high speed + a free (fast 65MHz+) GPIO[31:0] + a fair speed GPIO[15:0].

-So that's a chip with a lot of pins.

(Note: This was originally posted under Cortex-M7, as it's my wish that there will be Cortex-M7 microcontrollers with the mentioned features)

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  • Big endian is quite well supported. It isn't quite as well supported as little endian because ARM was originally entirely little endian and there are some niggles like the format of the instructions and control space registers, but it is supported to compete in networking like you say. You can get big endian versions of the compilers and some of the operating systems. If getting a development board you'll need to check that it is always big-endian or has a switch to enable it.

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  • Big endian is quite well supported. It isn't quite as well supported as little endian because ARM was originally entirely little endian and there are some niggles like the format of the instructions and control space registers, but it is supported to compete in networking like you say. You can get big endian versions of the compilers and some of the operating systems. If getting a development board you'll need to check that it is always big-endian or has a switch to enable it.

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