Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Introduction to ARM processor

N.J. Hariprasad and Jaseem Ahammed

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ARM is a family of instruction set architectures used in making computer processors developed by ARM Holdings. It is based on the reduced instruction set computing architecture which is commonly called as RISC. In 2010, ARM Holdings, plc reported shipments of approximately 6100 million ARM-based processors to manufacturers of chips based on ARM architectures, representing 35 per cent of digital TVs and set-top boxes, 95 per cent of smartphones and 10 per cent of mobile computers. As of 2014, ARM is the most widely used 32-bit instruction set architecture in terms of quantity produced.

Millions of electronic gadgets around the world invade our daily life and we have become completely dependent on them for performing most of our work. A very nice example to justify this would be a smartphone that everyone is quickly adapting to, due to its varied features. These gadgets are the pleasing results of the ceaseless developments in the field of electronics. Most of these gadgets are fitted with embedded processors that not only occupy less space but also ensure that users get a smooth experience whilst using the device. The ARM processor cores used in most of these devices follow an architecture that helps them perform efficiently.

Nowadays, there are several embedded architectures in use such as ARM architecture developed by ARM Ltd, Atmel’s AVR architecture, TI’s MSP430 architecture and many more. However, the extensively used and most popular embedded architecture amongst many companies is the ARM Ltd’s ARM architecture.

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The ARM1 second processor for the BBC Micro (Courtesy: en.wikipedia.org)
The ARM1 second processor for the BBC Micro (Courtesy: en.wikipedia.org)

History of ARM

Advanced RISC machine (ARM) is the first reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor for commercial use, which is currently being developed by ARM Holdings. The history of ARM processor dates back to 1983 in England when Acorn Computers Ltd officially launched an Acorn RISC Management project after being inspired to design its own processor by Berkeley RISC, one of the high-impact projects under ARPA’s (Advanced Research Projects Agency, now converted to DARPA) VLSI project, dealing with RISC-based microprocessor design led by David Patterson who coined the term ‘RISC.’ As the name suggests, it does not mean that the processors with less than 100 instructions are qualified to RISC category, but instead they should have an highly optimised instruction set.

ARM in the beginning was known as Acorn RISC machine. With VLSI Technology Inc. as its silicon partner, ARM came up with ARM1, the first ARM silicon on April 26, 1985, which was used as a second processor to the BBC Micro to develop the simulation software to finish work on the support chips (VIDC, IOC and MEMC) and to increase the operating speed of the CAD software used in development of ARM2. Apple, whilst developing an entirely new computing platform for its Newton, a personal digital assistant, found that only Acorn RISC machine was close to the requirements needed for implementation, but since ARM had no integral memory management unit, Apple collaborated with Acorn to develop ARM.

The result of this collaboration was that both Acorn Group and Apple Computer, Inc., with 43 per cent share each, and VLSI Technology, Inc. as an investor, a separate company, ARM Ltd, was established in 1990. Also, the advanced research and development section of Acorn was employed here. After that time, ARM became the acronym for advanced RISC machine.

But what was Berkeley RISC?

In the past, CISC microprocessor cores like Motorola 68000 used only a subset of the available instruction set; therefore most of the decoding circuitry for the never-used instructions was wasted. But in RISC, CISC was replaced with multiple registers to speed up the execution since access to these registers would take less cycles than memory access needs, outperforming CISC.

Considering the case of ADD instructions in which CISC would appear in different formats where one would be meant for adding the numbers in two registers and placing the result in third, whilst the other would allow to add two numbers stored in the main memory and store the result in a register, offering wide variety of instructions to perform the required operations and providing several options as operands.

ARM Processor mode and mode number

But in the case of RISC designs, the ADD would always take registers as operands, which creates a necessity for the programmer to write additional instructions to load the values from memory whenever required. Now, the Berkeley RISC was able to provide good performance utilising pipelining and register-windowing technique. In register windowing, the CPU contains a large number of registerss around 128, together called a register file, whilst the group of eight registers is called a window. But a program can only use one window, thereby allowing fast procedure calls. The call simply moves the window down to the set of eight registers used by that procedure and the return moves the window back.

After that time, RISC has seen a lot of developments proving its simplicity over CISC. Here are some of the features of RISC:

1. Large general-purpose 32-bit register banks
2. Fixed 32-bit instruction size
3. Hard-wired instruction decode logic instead of microcoded ROMs
4. Single-cycle execution is possible
5. Pipelined execution
6. Easier to prototype

RISC features can be introduced in CISC processors but would require much more hardware. A typical RISC architecture consists of a large uniform register file, load and store architecture, simple addressing modes and uniform fixed-length instruction fields. Due to this characteristic, we achieve high performance, low code size, low power consumption and low silicon area.

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