Foreword

Progress in the ARM microcontroller community since the publication of the first edition of this book has been impressive, significantly exceeding our expectations and it is no exaggeration to say that it is revolutionizing the world of Microcontroller Units (MCUs). There are many thousands of end users of ARM-powered MCUs, making it the fastest growing MCU technology on the market. As such, the second edition of Joseph's book is very timely and provides a good opportunity to present updated information on MCU technology.

As a community, progress has been made in many important areas including the number of companies building Cortex™-M3 processor-based devices (now over 30), development of the Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS) enabling simpler code portability between Cortex processors and silicon vendors, improved versions of development tool chains, and the release of the Cortex-M0 processor to take ARM MCUs into even the lowest cost designs.

With such a rate of change it is certainly an exciting time to be developing embedded solutions based on the Cortex-M3 processor!