Selecting the Right Hardware

It may be surprising that the first chapter of this book, which is written for Cortex-M software developers, is all about hardware. This is because software, in all its forms, is ultimately run on hardware. It is critical to understand which hardware capabilities exist to properly leverage them in software.

Additionally, you will likely need a development board for debugging your code during development. Some of you reading may even have a level of influence over which hardware is ultimately selected for your device. All in all, no matter what specific situation you are in, understanding what Cortex-M hardware is out there—and what it can do—will help you develop quality software for your current and future projects.

So, in this opening chapter, we will explain how to select Cortex-M hardware and provide an overview of where to find development boards. Note that we will be discussing both individual Cortex-M processors and Cortex-M development boards.

There are different ways to frame which Cortex-M hardware is best suited for your specific project. Examples can be helpful; the first section of this chapter lists common embedded/IoT use cases and presents Cortex-M processors that fit that situation. The side-by-side comparison is also helpful; the second section ranks processors by performance, power, and area metrics. The third section then focuses on development boards, discussing trade-offs.

The chapter ends by selecting two boards that will be used for hands-on examples in future chapters. In a nutshell, the topics we’ll discuss in this chapter are presented here:

• Processor selection through use cases
• Processor selection based on performance and power
• Microcontroller development boards