A Practical Application of ARM Cortex-M3 Processor Core in Embedded System Engineering

Embedded Systems Engineering has grown in recent years to become an integral part of our daily living as it finds striking applications in various spheres of our lives. These range from Manufacturing, Electronic Health, Telecommunications, Construction and Robotics to numerous other fields. Primarily, Embedded Systems are usually a combination of selected electrical and electronic components functioning together under the direct control of a programmed controller. They serve fundamentally as additional units incorporated within already existing infrastructures with the sole aim of providing dedicated services to the larger infrastructure. Many of the controllers used operate on uniquely designed processor cores, instruction sets, and architecture profiles. This paper seeks to elucidate the application of the ARM Cortext-M3 processor based NXP LPC 1768 Microcontroller unit in the design and development of a Temperature Monitoring and Logging System. The write-up starts off with an overview of the principal ARM processor core families, architecture profiles, instruction sets and subsequently, demonstrates its utilization in the design of a Temperature Monitoring and Logging System. The paper shows how the NXP LPC 1768 Microcontroller Unit successfully serves as the brain of the temperature logger device through its standardized interfacing with a TMP102 temperature sensor using the InterIntegrated Circuit (I2C) protocol. The Microcontroller is programmed using Embedded C while other unique functionalities of the ARM Cortex-M3 core such as Interrupt Handling and System Tick Timer efficiency are also explored.