New book on Cortex-M0 / M0 +

Original author: Jack Ganssle
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ARM sold more than 200 licenses for Cortex-M cores, and thousands of variants of these devices are on the market. Although the company created the M7 core last year, which offers incredible performance for the MCU, the entry-level core line continues to be of great interest to manufacturers. The implementation of the M0 core requires about 12,000 gates (it’s hard to say whether we are talking about gates or basic elements, in any case it’s a little, but in the first - much less - a translator’s note), so it costs a little more than nothing (implementation, of course, and not a license, by the way, if anyone knows the prices - share in the comments - pp). M0 + has the same set of instructions (like M0-pp), but it shows better performance with low power consumption for battery-powered devices, plus advanced (optional) debugging capabilities,

(The following is ... a translation of the description of the book describing the processors - what is the derivative of iron, the third? - pp).
Joseph Yu wrote a new book about these two processors. The “Complete Guide to ARM Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M0 + Processors” complements its early folio on the M3. Given the volume of 746 pages, I have to agree that this is really an exhaustive and undoubtedly “complete” work on these cores. The author of the book works on ARM, and some parts of the first two chapters can be considered as advertising companies, although they have a lot of valuable information.

The book is very relevant, as it highlights issues related to obtaining high EEMBC (performance indicators - pp) at ultra-low power voltages. I wrote about this in March, and for those of us who work with battery-powered systems, it's worth seeing to what values ​​this indicator can be raised. The chapter covers low-power features, but you should deeply study the documentation of the products you use, as licensees add sometimes a staggering number of their own functions to minimize the pendants consumed.

The audience of the book is somewhat blurred. I would argue that it consists of practicing engineers, since the book contains all the details necessary for implementation. But it has a whole chapter devoted to explaining the basics of developing embedded software that readers of this site may miss. This section of the book contains an introduction to the CMSIS library, an important resource for Cortex-M users, but we already know everything about dumping, data types, and other fundamentals of our business.

As in his earlier book, Mr. Yu does a good job describing the architecture of both microcontrollers and bus devices. If you use, or consider such devices, then this information is absolutely necessary for you. ARM cores are complex, contain many buses, variable length pipelines, various byte orders in memory and other features that can cause confusion.

The best part of the book is four chapters about getting started on writing code. Each covers one medium from Keil, IAR, GCC, and mbed. Choose the appropriate tool (let's start the hollywood? - pp), go to the appropriate chapter, and Mr. Yu will help you quickly configure the environment and write your first code for Cortex-M0 / M0 +. He also gives some specific advice for Freescale (FRDM) and ST (STM32) products. Your boss must pay for this book.

One section describes in detail the transfer of code from various processors (for example, 8051) to M0 / M0 +. This will undoubtedly puzzle sellers of other types of processors! But basically this section describes in detail the transfer of code from more complex, ARM cores to entry-level cores, a process that has certain features. These recommendations are very helpful.

The style of the author is clear and the typography is not fancy. One pun, which, perhaps, is more like a complaint about the state of the modern publishing industry: there is not a single sheet testifying to the participation of the editor. Once upon a time (in one Galaxy - np) there were people who were masters of the English language, who found obvious language errors and corrected them. (Okay, just grammatical errors, that’s still bullshit. But when you read the published book - the translation of technical literature, and the Bode diagrams are shifted with an offset, and you just can’t understand what a strange break in the frequency response is, it’s really unpleasant. Or when calculating the thermal resistance, a comma is passed, they write 62 instead of 0.62, and suddenly, when the radiator is installed, the thermal resistance of the system increases, this can be taken down by the brain. - long paragraph) This book contains many grammatical errors. Example: “Easy to learning programming of new devices” (probably, there really is a mistake, but not with my knowledge of English to find it, so I take my word for it). They distract, but do not diminish, the merits of technical content.

The book costs $ 62 on Amazon, or $ 34 for the Kindle version (probably the electronic version is pp). To give as much as 62 bucks for a book is a very ridiculous offer for the current state of affairs (is there a crisis there? 62 seemed to me here and here - these are slightly different bucks - pp). But if you're new to these cores, crush your toad and buy a book. She will give you an idea of ​​the necessary things for real projects.

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