By Todd Hixon
In Part 1 in this series, I dealt with the myriad of details relating to exception vector table formating, startup code/stack configuration, remapping RAM functions, and hardware interrupt configuration that a programmer must be concerned with porting code from an existing ARM7 to the Cortex-M3 core. Now in this second part, the tutorial continues with a discussion of software interrupts, fault handling, the SWP command, instruction time, assembly language, and optimizations.
Software interrupts
The ARM7TDMI allows software to generate an exception via the SWI instruction. This exception is typically used as an interface to system drivers or other privileged code that cannot be called directly.
