HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION OF ARM CORTEX-M3 DESIGN ON FPGA

Abstract

The Cortex-M3 processor is designed for high-performance, cost-effective platforms across a wide range of applications, including microcontrollers, automotive body systems, industrial control systems, and sensors. It is specifically chosen for its classification as a microcontroller processor from ARM, making it suitable for embedded IoT applications. The System-on-Chip (SoC) design integrates the ARM Cortex-M3 32-bit processor, with a customized IoT subsystem and peripherals on an FPGA. The design is tailored to meet specific requirements and specifications, ensuring chip functionality validation on the Xilinx FPGA platform, which was previously implemented on an Intel FPGA. The existing design had a limited number of master and slave ports for interfacing peripherals. The customization of peripherals is, to increase the number of master and slave ports by modifying the AHB and APB interconnects while modifying memory mapping of the ports to our specification, using an address decoding logic. FPGA prototyping is done to validate the test cases again for the modified Cortex-M3 Design on the Xilinx platform. The Keil uVision5 software is used to translate C-programs into binary files that is loaded into the SoC's Memory for the processor to run and Xilinx Vivado is used for simulation. The Hardware implementation is done on the Arty100– T FPGA platform to  test and verify the functionality of the chip.