ARM architecture

ARM architecture has RISC based computer processors. Now a days, in majority of smartphones, televisions and mobile controllers chips based on ARM architecture are used. Benefits of RISC like low cost, less heat and low power usage provides main use to portable devices. Semiconductor companies buy license for ARM architecture to design their own system.

In ARM architecture, to compensate for the simpler design, compared with processors like the Intel 80286 and Motorola 68020, some additional design features were used in addition to RISC features. These features are conditional execution, link register, powerful index addressing mode and PC-relative addressing. “Thumb instruction set” improves compiled code density and has 16 bit instructions. “Thumb-2” has 32 bit instructions and can provide variable length instruction set.