The Cortex-M Family
Arm does not sell chips. It sells processor designs, and a silicon vendor — ST, NXP, Nordic, Raspberry Pi — licenses one, wraps it in memory and peripherals, and sells you the result. That arrangement is why "it's an Arm chip" tells you almost nothing on its own, and why the useful question is always which Arm core, in which configuration, from which vendor.
The Register Model
A Cortex-M shows you sixteen 32-bit registers at any moment, and thirteen of them are genuinely interchangeable scratch space. The other three are the processor's control surface — a stack pointer that is secretly one of two, a link register that sometimes holds a return address and sometimes holds a magic number, and a program counter that is one bit weirder than it looks. Alongside those sit half a dozen special registers that are not in the main file at all: you cannot load or store them, and the only way to touch them is a pair of dedicated instructions.
Thumb-2 and Code Density
On a desktop CPU, instruction encoding is an implementation detail you can go a whole career without thinking about. On a microcontroller it is a budget. The STM32F411RE has 512 KB of flash and 128 KB of RAM, and that flash figure is one of the two or three numbers that set the price of the chip. Every byte an instruction occupies is a byte of product cost, multiplied by the production run.
Privilege Modes and Stacks
A Cortex-M has two independent switches that most bare-metal firmware never touches, and that an RTOS depends on completely. One decides which stack the processor is using; the other decides whether the code running is allowed to change anything important. They are separate — you can be unprivileged on the main stack or privileged on the process stack — and confusing them is the source of a lot of half-right explanations.
The Memory Map and Bit-Banding
A microcontroller has one 4 GB address space and everything lives in it: flash, RAM, every peripheral register, the interrupt controller, the debug hardware. There is no MMU, so what you write in a pointer is the physical address the bus sees. That is the simplification that makes bare-metal firmware tractable — and it means the layout of that space is not a vendor's private business but part of the architecture you program against.
Exceptions and the Vector Table
On most processors, getting from "an interrupt line went high" to "my C function is running" involves software: a dispatcher reads a status register, works out which source fired, and calls the right handler. Cortex-M does none of that. The hardware reads a table of function pointers at a known address, indexes it by exception number, and branches — having already pushed the registers a C function is allowed to clobber. Your handler is an ordinary function with an ordinary prologue, and it starts running a fixed and small number of cycles after the event.
The NVIC
The vector table answers where. The Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller answers whether, when, and in what order — and it is the only part of the exception model you actively program. Every interrupt line on the chip arrives at the NVIC; the NVIC decides whether that line is enabled, records it as pending if it is not yet serviceable, compares its priority against whatever the processor is currently doing, and hands the winner to the core.
SysTick and the Core Peripherals
Almost everything on a microcontroller is the vendor's. The timers, the UARTs, the clock tree, the GPIO blocks — all of it is ST's design, at ST's addresses, described in ST's reference manual, and none of it transfers to a part from a different vendor. A handful of peripherals are not like that. They are Arm's, they are built into the processor itself, they sit at the same addresses on every Cortex-M ever made, and code that uses them ports between vendors without changes.
The Memory Protection Unit
A null-pointer write on a Cortex-M does not crash. Address 0x00000000 is real memory — it is the start of flash, or the boot alias — so *(uint32t )0 = 42 on a fresh chip silently does nothing at all, and the program carries on. A stack that overflows its intended region does not crash either; it grows down into .bss and corrupts variables that belong to something else, and the failure surfaces minutes later in code that is entirely innocent. Both are the same problem: on a bare Cortex-M, memory has no permissions, so a wrong access is indistinguishable from a right one.*
Floating Point and DSP Extensions
Writing float in C on a microcontroller does not tell you what the hardware will do. The same line of source can compile to one instruction, to a forty-cycle library call, or to a two-hundred-cycle double-precision emulation — and the compiler chooses silently, based on flags you may not have set deliberately. Nothing in the source distinguishes the three cases, which is why "why is my control loop suddenly missing deadlines" is so often a floating-point question.
RISC-V for Arm Developers
Everything in this folder so far has described one architecture. The reason that is a reasonable way to spend eleven pages is that Cortex-M is what the overwhelming majority of microcontroller work is written against. The reason it is not the only thing worth knowing is that RISC-V parts are now genuinely shipping in volume — the ESP32-C3 in a hobbyist's hands, the CH32V003 at ten cents, the RISC-V management cores inside SoCs whose application processors are Arm — and the transition is much easier than a new instruction set sounds, provided you know which of your Cortex-M assumptions are architectural and which are Arm's.