Roadmap / Foundations
Computer Architecture
You need memory maps and interrupts to read a datasheet or reference manual.
Goal Explain how your C code actually executes inside the chip.
- 01Von Neumann and Harvard
Whether code and data travel the same path or separate ones.
- 02Inside the CPU
Registers, the ALU, the program counter, and the fetch-execute loop.
- 03Pipelines
Overlapping several instructions, and why branches are slow.
- 04Memory hierarchy
Registers, cache, SRAM, Flash: the faster, the smaller and costlier.
- 05Memory map
Code in Flash, variables in SRAM. Everything in an MCU has an address.
- 06Buses and peripherals
Peripheral registers live at memory addresses too. AHB, APB and memory-mapped I/O.
- 07Stack and heap
The stack that grows with every call, and why embedded code is wary of the heap.
- 08
- 09DMA
Hardware that moves data between memory and peripherals without the CPU.
- 10ARM Cortex-M overview
M0, M3, M4, M7, and how MCU families such as STM32 are organised.
Draw one function call as a stack diagram
Show step by step how registers and the stack change when a two-argument function is called.
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