by Joseph Yiu, ARM Ltd., EETimes
Some application developers might need to port applications from 8-bit or 16-bit microcontrollers to the Cortex-M0. By moving from these architectures to the Cortex-M0, often you can get better code density, higher performance, and lower power consumption.

Common Modifications: When porting applications from these microcontrollers to the Cortex-M0, the modifications of the software typically involve the following:

1- Startup code and vector table. Different processor architectures have different startup code and interrupt vector tables. Usually the startup code and the vector table will have to be replaced.

2- Stack allocation adjustment. With the Cortex-M processors, the stack size requirement can be very different from an 8-bit or 16-bit architecture. In addition, the methods to define stack location and stack size are also different from 8-bit and 16-bit development tools.

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