SAM4S Series [Preliminary]
7. Processor and Architecture
7.1 ARM Cortex-M4 Processor
• Thumb-2 (ISA) subset consisting of all base Thumb-2 instructions, 16-bit and 32-bit
• Harvard processor architecture enabling simultaneous instruction fetch with data load/store
• Three-stage pipeline
• Saturating arithmetic for signal processing
• Hardware division and fast digital-signal-processing oriented multiply accumulate
• Thumb and Debug states
• Handler and Thread modes
• Low latency ISR entry and exit
7.2 APB/AHB bridge
The SAM4S embeds One Peripheral bridge.
The peripherals of the bridge are clocked by MCK.
7.3 Matrix Masters
The Bus Matrix of the SAM4S manages 4 masters, which means that each master can perform
an access concurrently with others, to an available slave.
Each master has its own decoder, which is defined specifically for each master. In order to sim-
plify the addressing, all the masters have the same decodings.
Table 7-1.
Master 0
Master 1
Master 2
Master 3
List of Bus Matrix Masters
Cortex-M4 Instruction/Data
Cortex-M4 System
Peripheral DMA Controller (PDC)
CRC Calculation Unit
7.4 Matrix Slaves
The Bus Matrix of the SAM4S manages 5 slaves. Each slave has its own arbiter, allowing a dif-
ferent arbitration per slave.
Table 7-2.
Slave 0
Slave 1
Slave 2
Slave 3
Slave 4
List of Bus Matrix Slaves
Internal SRAM
Internal ROM
Internal Flash
External Bus Interface
Peripheral Bridge
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11100BS–ATARM–31-Jul-12