ARM Cortex-R

ARM Cortex-R

Designed by	ARM Holdings
Microarchitecture	ARMv7-R

The ARM Cortex-R is a family of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings. The Cortex-R is optimized for hard real-time and safety critical applications. It is one of the three different Arm Cortex profiles, the other two being the Cortex-A for applications processors, and Cortex-M for micro-controllers.

Overview

The ARM Cortex-R is an ARM microprocessor architecture which is designed for high performance hard real-time and safety critical applications. It is similar to the Cortex-A profile for applications processing but adds features which make it more fault tolerant and suitable for use in hard real-time and safety critical applications.

Real time and safety critical features added include:

• Non overlapping memory regions
• Tightly coupled memory
• Increased exception handling in hardware
• Hardware division instructions
• Memory protection Unit (MPU)
• Deterministic interrupt handling as well as fast non-maskable interrupts
• ECC on L1 memory and buses
• Dual-core lockstep for CPU fault tolerance

Applications

The Cortex-R is suitable for use in computer controlled systems where very low latency and/or safety is required. An example of a hard real-time safety critical application would be a modern electronic braking system in an automobile. The system not only needs to be fast and responsive to a plethora of sensor data input, but is also responsible for human safety. A failure of such a system could lead to severe injury or loss of life.

Other examples of hard real-time and/or safety critical applications include:

• Medical device
• Programmable Logic Controller
• electronic control units for a wide variety of applications.
• Robotics
• Avionics
• Motion control

See also

• ARM architecture
• List of ARM cores

External links

Official

• Navigating the Cortex Maze
• ARM Cortex-R official website
• ARM Cortex-R4
• ARM Cortex-R5
• ARM Cortex-R7
• ARM Cortex-R8

Other

• CORTEX-R versus CORTEX-M