Introduction

My third book on ARM Assembly Language programming has recently started shipping from Apress/Springer, just in time for Christmas. This one is “RP2040 Assembly Language Programming” and goes into detail on how to program Raspberry’s RP2040 SoC. This chip is used in the Raspberry Pi Pico along with boards from several other manufacturers such as Seeed Studios, AdaFruit, Arduino and Pimoroni.

Flavours of ARM Assembly Language

ARM has ambitions to provide CPUs from the cheapest microcontrollers costing less than a dollar all the way up to supercomputers costing millions of dollars. Along the road to this, there are now three distinct flavours of ARM Assembly Language:

1. A Series 32-bit
2. M Series 32-bit
3. 64-bit

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

A Series 32-bit

For A Series, each instruction is 32-bits in length and as the processors have evolved they added features to support virtual memory, advanced security and other features to support advanced operating systems like Linux, iOS and Android. This is the Assembly Language used in 32-bit phones, tablets and the Raspberry Pi OS. This is covered in my book “Raspberry Pi Assembly Language Programming”.

M Series 32-bit

The full A series instruction set didn’t work well in microcontroller environments. Using 32-bits for each instruction was considered wasteful as well as supporting all the features for advanced operating systems made the CPUs too expensive. To solve the memory problem, ARM introduced a mode to A series 32-bit where each instruction was 16-bits, this saved memory, but the processors were still too expensive. When ARM introduced their M series, or microcontroller processors, they made this 16-bit instruction format the native format and removed most of the advanced operating system features. The RP2040 SoC used in the Raspberry Pi Pico is one of these M Series CPUs using dual core ARM Cortex M0+ CPUs. This is the subject of my current book “RP2040 Assembly Language Programming”.

64-bit

Like Intel and AMD, ARM made the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit processors. As part of this they cleaned up the instruction set, added registers and created a third variant of ARM Assembly Language. iOS and Android are now fully 64-bit and you can run 64-bit versions of Linux on newer Raspberry Pis. The ARM 64-bit instruction set is the topic of my book: “Programming with 64-Bit ARM Assembly Language”.

ARM 64-bit CPUs can run the 32-bit instruction set, and then the M series instruction set is a subset of the A series 32-bit instruction set. Each one is a full featured rich instruction set and deserves a book of its own. If you want to learn all three, I recommend buying all three of my books.

More Than ARM CPUs

The RP2040 is a System on a Chip (SoC), it includes the two M-series ARM CPU cores; but, it also includes many built in hardware interfaces, memory and other components. RP2040 boards don’t need much beyond the RP2040 chip besides a method to interface other components.

“RP2040 Assembly Language Programming” includes coverage of how to use the various hardware registers to control the built-in hardware controllers, as well as the innovative Programmable I/O (PIO) hardware coprocessors. These PIO coprocessors have their own Assembly Language and are capable of some very sophisticated communications protocols, even VGA.

Where to Buy

“RP2040 Assembly Language Programming” is available from most booksellers including:

Currently if you search for “RP2040” in books on any of these sites, my book comes up first.

Summary

The Raspberry Pi Pico and the RP2040 chip aren’t the first ARM M-series based microcontrollers, but with their release, suddenly the popularity and acceptance of ARM processors in the microcontroller space has exploded. The instruction set for ARM’s M-series processors is simple, clean and a great example of a RISC instruction set. Whether you are into more advanced microcontroller applications or learning Assembly Language for the first time, this is a great place to start.