ARM® Cortex™-M3 Processor

The ARM® Cortex™-M3 32-bit RISC processor is the first ARM® processor based on the ARMv7 architecture and has been specifically developed to provide a high-performance, low-cost platform for a broad range of applications including microcontrollers, automotive body systems, industrial control systems and wireless networking.

The central core of the Cortex™-M3 processor, based on a 3-stage pipeline Harvard bus architecture, incorporates advanced features including single cycle multiply and hardware divide to deliver an outstanding efficiency of 1.25 DMIPS/MHz. The Cortex™-M3 processor also implements the new Thumb®-2 instruction set architecture, which when combined with features such as unaligned data storage and atomic bit manipulation delivers 32-bit performance at a cost equivalent to modern 8- and 16-bit devices. Substantial amounts of code will work on the Cortex™-M3 processor without modification. If the application uses an RTOS which is available for Cortex™-M3 processor or is written almost exclusively in C, the migration can be completed through minimal re-compilation effort. If the application is written in assembly and uses only Thumb instructions, the code will work seamlessly on the Cortex™-M3 processor.

Introduction to the ARM® Cortex™-M3 Processor Core (pdf, 346KB)

ARM® Cortex™-M3 Development Kits

A broad range of development and evaluation kits are available for the featured Cortex™-M3 microcontrollers with a variety of third party IDE and Compiler options. These evaluation kits include all the cables, software, and documentation required to develop and run applications for the ARM® Cortex™-M3 microcontrollers quickly and easily.

• STM32 ARM® Cortex™-M3 Development Kits
• Stellaris® Cortex™-M3 Evaluation Kits

ARM® Cortex™-M3 Featured Suppliers

STMicroelectronics is a global independent semiconductor company and is a leader in developing and delivering semiconductor solutions across the spectrum of microelectronics applications. Learn More...