The microprocessor (also known as Central Processing Unit (CPU)) can be defined simply as a calculation machine. It executes predefined operations called instructions. The steps the CPU performs in order to execute an instruction is called an instruction cycle (also known as fetch-execute cycle or fetch-decode-execute cycle). Understanding the instruction cycle is a great starting point for
Overview Speaking in general a bootloader is any piece of code that is executed before the main application code starts. In this article we will focus on a particular type of a bootloader - one that is used to erase the code of the main application from the flash memory and program it with a
Overview There are two major types of memory system architectures when it comes to executing code in embedded systems: Execute in Place (XIP): The program code is executed directly from a flash memory. Store and Download (SnD) : The program code is stored in a non-volatile memory but is copied to RAM during the boot up
Hardware memory is used for storing information. In the case of embedded systems that may be the program data ,the program code itself, event logging etc. There are many types of technologies used when creating memory cells and many ways to categorize them, but we can distinguish two major categories based on the memory reaction
Exceptions are events that disrupt the normal execution flow of the program. When an exception occurs the processor handles it by usually executing dedicated piece of code called exception handler. Each type of exception can have its own exception handler. In some literature sources exceptions and interrupts are analyzed as two different things. Expeptions being
A breakpoint is an intentional stopping place during an execution of a program. It is a powerful debugging feature allowing us to suspend the execution of the program at a certain point and examine the current values of variables and memory locations. The program can then be resumed from the exact point it was suspended. Adding or removing breakpoints
We can generally define three levels of abstraction from the underlying hardware when we develop embedded programs: Machine Code Assembly Language High Level Language Machine code is the native language of the microprocessors (but it is not used for directly writing programs). So no matter at what level of abstraction we decide to write our
There are two main concepts that have to be explained in order for us to fully understand the differences between global and local variables in C programs: Scope - determines the region of the program where a variable can be accessed Storage Duration - determines when a variable is created and destroyed (lifetime of the variable)
The memory layout of C programs consists of several segments. The segments accessible to a user program are shown in the figure below: Fig. 1 C program memory layout Code Segment (.text) This segment stores the executable program code (the machine instructions). Variables defined with the const type qualifier can also be placed
Overview Even though the boot process can be a complex sequence involving multiple steps it always starts with the same first step. When the power-on reset sequence is finished and the CPU comes out of reset, the program counter is pointing to the address of the reset vector (boot vector). This address contains the first instruction that
