Post by thread:=?us-ascii?Q?RE: =5BEE=5D the industry's first Cor

> > http://www.luminarymicro.com/ > > Press release : US$1 32-bit ARM MCU > > 20MHz, 8k flash, 2k ram. Not exactly what one expects from an ARM. Why not? It is what you get in a 16F. > OTOH, nice package, onboard voltage regulator, nice deep-fifo uart. > It'll be interesting to watch! If I can realy get some from mouser I will surely try them! Note that the low-end philips ARMs are not much more expensive (but: not in SOIC!). Wouter van Ooijen -- ------------------------------------------- Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: http://www.voti.nl consultancy, development, PICmicro products docent Hogeschool van Utrecht: http://www.voti.nl/hvu

> Mip for mip, are the ARM instructions capable of much more? As always, it depends. If you can away with the RMW problem, a PIC can set or reset a pin in a single instruction. This is a bit more complicated on an ARM, but it can be done. An ARM is a register-register architecture. So no direct manipulation of bits in memory. Compare: # one 12, 14 or 16 bit instruction bsf some_place_in_memory, a_specific_bit with # 4 instructions, 32 bits each ldr r0, =some_place_in_memory ldr r1, [ r0 ] and r0, r0, # ( 1 << a_specific_bit ) str r1, [ r0 ] Now this makes an ARM seem realy bad. In practive variables or their addresses will often already be in registers, and there is a more compact Thumb instruction set. On the other extreme: add three 96-bit integers, which are already in registers adds r0, r1, r2 adcs r3, r4, r5 adc r6, r7, r8 try for yourself how a PIC would do this. > Or are the ARM mips more powerful? in most cases, a lot more powerfull. > Do they offer ICSP? The ARM is not a chip, so you should compare a specific chip. My experience is with the Philips chips, which have a JTAG debugger interface (nice, but it claims 16 (!) pins), and resident bootloader firmware (philips provides a serial loader program). > Is there an IDE similar (or better) to MPLAB? I am no fan of IDEs so I might not be a good judge. At school we have made and use IDEs around PSPad and DevCpp, using Insight as debugger with the JTAG interface. > How do they compare to pics for writing assembly language code? Much more instructions and variations to learn, much easier to write code (mostly: no paging and banking, and it is nice not to have to think about the limits of 8 or 16 bit integers). > What sort of peripherals do they come with? depends on the chip. My lessons use the LPC2106. Check http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/pip/LPC2106.html. I think it is compareable to what you get on a fat 30F. > What is the significance of the "Cortex-M3" name? Is it just > hype or is > it some sort of improvement on regular ARM devices? I realy have no idea. Wouter van Ooijen -- ------------------------------------------- Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: http://www.voti.nl consultancy, development, PICmicro products docent Hogeschool van Utrecht: http://www.voti.nl/hvu