The Choices for Programming ARM Cortex-M Microcontrollers by Joseph Yiu and Ian Johnson, ARM ARM ARCHITECTURE AND DEVELOPMENT TOOLS An increasing number of vendors offer 32-bit microcontrollers based on ARM® Cortex®-M processors, and at the same time, there are also new development environments introduced for these microcontroller products. Some programming languages and tools, previously available only for programming for desktop computers, are being ported to ARM microcontrollers too. Technical advantages of the ARM Cortex-M architecture such as high performance, high code density, OS support and memory system flexibility also enable these software development methods to be used on ARM devices. To use these methods with legacy 16-bit or 8-bit devices could be very inefficient or even impossible. The open nature of the ARM architecture allows software tool vendors to develop tools for a wide range of microcontrollers from different vendors, whereas tools developed for 8-bit and 16-bit processors’ architectures typically have a limited market reach.
Figure 1: Design flow using Java ME Embedded
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Wider adoption also allows programming tools vendors to create application development environments for particular embedded segments, such as M2M (machine to machine) and IoT (Internet of things) and alternate programming languages. In this article we will cover some of these development environments such as Java and Simulink.
JAVA TECHNOLOGY Java technology speeds up development and prototyping. Although there are multiple Java development environments available, this article will look at two. Oracle® Java on ARM architecture targets IoT and M2M applications. Programming using Java ME (Micro Edition) software development kit (SDK) is identical to the Java SE (Standard Edition) Embedded (e.g. Eclipse/Netbeans IDE), except, currently, the compiled object is optimized for embedded systems with small memory foot print and the GUI library or JavaFX are not available on Java ME.