LPC3180 - Documentation

Documentation

The amount of documentation for all ARM chips is daunting, especially for newcomers. The documentation for microcontrollers from past decades would easily be inclusive in a single document, but as chips have evolved so has the documentation grown. The total documentation is especially hard to grasp for all ARM chips since it consists of documents from the IC manufacturer (NXP Semiconductors) and documents from CPU core vendor (ARM Holdings).

A typical top-down documentation tree is: high-level marketing slides, datasheet for the exact physical chip, a detailed reference manual that describes common peripherals and other aspects of physical chips within the same series, reference manual for the exact ARM core processor within the chip, reference manual for the ARM architecture of the core which includes detailed description of all instruction sets.

Documentation tree (top to bottom)

1. NXP marketing slides.
2. NXP datasheets.
3. NXP reference manuals.
4. ARM core reference manuals.
5. ARM architecture reference manuals.

NXP Semiconductors has additional documents, including: evaluation board user manuals, application notes, getting started with development software, software library documents, errata, and more.