ARM Cortex-M

The ARM Cortex-M is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by Arm Holdings. They are intended for microcontroller use, and have been shipped in tens of billions of devices. The cores consist of the Cortex-M0, Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M23, Cortex-M33, Cortex-M35P. The Cortex-M4 / M7 / M33 / M35P cores have an FPU silicon option, and when included in the silicon these cores are known as 'Cortex-Mx with FPU' or 'Cortex-MxF', where 'x' is the core number. The ARM Cortex-M is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by Arm Holdings. They are intended for microcontroller use, and have been shipped in tens of billions of devices. The cores consist of the Cortex-M0, Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M23, Cortex-M33, Cortex-M35P. The Cortex-M4 / M7 / M33 / M35P cores have an FPU silicon option, and when included in the silicon these cores are known as 'Cortex-Mx with FPU' or 'Cortex-MxF', where 'x' is the core number. The ARM Cortex-M family are ARM microprocessor cores which are designed for use in microcontrollers, ASICs, ASSPs, FPGAs, and SoCs. Cortex-M cores are commonly used as dedicated microcontroller chips, but also are 'hidden' inside of SoC chips as power management controllers, I/O controllers, system controllers, touch screen controllers, smart battery controllers, and sensors controllers. Though 8-bit microcontrollers were very popular in the past, Cortex-M has slowly been chipping away at the 8-bit market as the prices of low-end Cortex-M chips have moved downward. Cortex-M have become a popular replacements for 8-bit chips in applications that benefit from 32-bit math operations, and replacing older legacy ARM cores such as ARM7 and ARM9. Arm Holdings neither manufactures nor sells CPU devices based on its own designs, but rather licenses the processor architecture to interested parties. Arm offers a variety of licensing terms, varying in cost and deliverables. To all licensees, Arm provides an integratable hardware description of the ARM core, as well as complete software development toolset and the right to sell manufactured silicon containing the ARM CPU. Integrated device manufacturers (IDM) receive the ARM Processor IP as synthesizable RTL (written in Verilog). In this form, they have the ability to perform architectural level optimizations and extensions. This allows the manufacturer to achieve custom design goals, such as higher clock speed, very low power consumption, instruction set extensions (including floating point), optimizations for size, debug support, etc. To determine which components have been included in a particular ARM CPU chip, consult the manufacturer datasheet and related documentation.