This new book is the ideal gateway into Arm’s Helium technology, the M-Profile Vector Extension for the Arm Cortex-M processor series.

Helium brings exciting new capabilities to microcontrollers, allowing sophisticated digital signal processing or machine learning applications to be run on inexpensive, low-power devices. In the early chapters, the book introduces fundamental concepts at a very basic and accessible level, including Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), vector processing, floating and fixed-point data representations, and saturation. After an overview of the MVE architecture, the instruction set is broken down into clear groups for discussion, covering subjects like pipeline structure, predication and branch handling, data processing and memory access. The most practical sections of the book deal with the mechanics of coding for a Helium-capable core such as the Cortex-M55, including compilation, debug and optimization. Finally, the book concludes with perhaps the most important chapters on how to implement DSP and ML workloads. The book is intended to be useful to engineers and students who want to learn more about these new features. Knowledge of Cortex-M processors and basic DSP theory is assumed, and some prior knowledge of C and Arm assembly language is a prerequisite.