ARM//Cortex-M

ARM's microcontroller profile core family — optimized for low power, low cost, and deterministic real-time behavior.

ARM's microcontroller profile core family — optimized for low power, low cost, and deterministic real-time behavior.

The heart of most modern MCU devices.

Variants range from Cortex-M0 (tiny, 12K gates) to Cortex-M55 (with Helium vector extensions for TinyML)

Executes Thumb-2 instructions, has a nested vectored interrupt controller (NVIC), and runs bare-metal or RTOS.

Typical MCU has 1-2 Cortex-M cores. 2 equal cores ⟶ multitask (e.g. Wifi + Bluetooth, or app + comms)

2 different cores ⟶ efficiency (e.g. M7 handles heavy data, M4 watches timers; M7 can sleep while M4 monitors)

Target: consumer products, start-ups, mass-market devices.