NXP Semiconductors
LPC178x/7x
32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller
The LPC178x/7x use a multi-layer AHB matrix to connect the ARM Cortex-M3 buses and
other bus masters to peripherals in a flexible manner that optimizes performance by
allowing peripherals that are on different slaves ports of the matrix to be accessed
simultaneously by different bus masters.
7.2 ARM Cortex-M3 processor
The ARM Cortex-M3 is a general purpose, 32-bit microprocessor, which offers high
performance and very low power consumption. The ARM Cortex-M3 offers many new
features, including a Thumb-2 instruction set, low interrupt latency, hardware division,
hardware single-cycle multiply, interruptable/continuable multiple load and store
instructions, automatic state save and restore for interrupts, tightly integrated interrupt
controller with wake-up interrupt controller, and multiple core buses capable of
simultaneous accesses.
Pipeline techniques are employed so that all parts of the processing and memory systems
can operate continuously. Typically, while one instruction is being executed, its successor
is being decoded, and a third instruction is being fetched from memory.
The ARM Cortex-M3 processor is described in detail in the Cortex-M3 Technical
Reference Manual that can be found on official ARM website.
7.3 On-chip flash program memory
The LPC178x/7x contain up to 512 kB of on-chip flash program memory. A new two-port
flash accelerator maximizes performance for use with the two fast AHB-Lite buses.
7.4 EEPROM
The LPC178x/7x contains up to 4032 byte of on-chip byte-erasable and
byte-programmable EEPROM data memory.
7.5 On-chip SRAM
The LPC178x/7x contain a total of up to 96 kB on-chip static RAM data memory. This
includes the main 64 kB SRAM, accessible by the CPU and DMA controller on a
higher-speed bus, and up to two additional 16 kB each SRAM blocks situated on a
separate slave port on the AHB multilayer matrix.
This architecture allows CPU and DMA accesses to be spread over three separate RAMs
that can be accessed simultaneously.
7.6 Memory Protection Unit (MPU)
The LPC178x/7x have a Memory Protection Unit (MPU) which can be used to improve the
reliability of an embedded system by protecting critical data within the user application.
The MPU allows separating processing tasks by disallowing access to each other's data,
disabling access to memory regions, allowing memory regions to be defined as read-only
and detecting unexpected memory accesses that could potentially break the system.
LPC178X_7X
Product data sheet
All information provided in this document is subject to legal disclaimers.
Rev. 5.5 — 26 April 2016
© NXP Semiconductors N.V. 2016. All rights reserved.
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