ARM Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16

Memory-Mapped Peripherals

16.1 Introduction

Modern embedded systems generally demand quite a bit from a single piece of silicon. For example, in the 1990s, cell phones were used for making phone calls and little else. Today, their uses range from checking e-mail to watching your favorite movie. The industry also geared up to include GPS on smartphones, so that when you miss that turn while driving down the road (probably because you were arguing with your smartphone), you can also ask it for directions. To build such systems, the hardware has to include more features in silicon, and the software has to learn to talk to those new features. SoC designs are packing ever more devices onto one die. Even off-the-shelf microcontrollers are ...