Glossary
ARM DDI 0301H
Copyright © 2004-2009 ARM Limited. All rights reserved.
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Input exception
A VFP exception condition in which one or more of the operands for a given operation are not
supported by the hardware. The operation bounces to support code for processing.
Instruction cache
A block of on-chip fast access memory locations, situated between the processor and main
memory, used for storing and retrieving copies of often used instructions. This is done to greatly
reduce the average speed of memory accesses and so to increase processor performance.
Instruction cycle count
The number of cycles for which an instruction occupies the Execute stage of the pipeline.
Instruction Memory Barrier (IMB)
An operation to ensure that the prefetch buffer is flushed of all out-of-date instructions.
Instrumentation trace
A component for debugging real-time systems through a simple memory-mapped trace
interface, providing
printf
style debugging.
Intelligent Energy Management (IEM)
A technology that enables dynamic voltage scaling and clock frequency variation to be used to
reduce power consumption in a device.
Intermediate result
An internal format used to store the result of a calculation before rounding. This format can have
a larger exponent field and fraction field than the destination format.
Internal scan chain
A series of registers connected together to form a path through a device, used during production
testing to import test patterns into internal nodes of the device and export the resulting values.
Interrupt handler
A program that control of the processor is passed to when an interrupt occurs.
Interrupt vector
One of a number of fixed addresses in low memory, or in high memory if high vectors are
configured, that contains the first instruction of the corresponding interrupt handler.
Invalidate
To mark a cache line as being not valid by clearing the valid bit. This must be done whenever
the line does not contain a valid cache entry. For example, after a cache flush all lines are invalid.
Jazelle architecture
The ARM Jazelle architecture extends the Thumb and ARM operating states by adding a Jazelle
state to the processor. Instruction set support for entering and exiting Java applications, real-time
interrupt handling, and debug support for mixed Java/ARM applications is present. When in
Jazelle state, the processor fetches and decodes Java bytecodes and maintains the Java operand
stack.
Joint Test Action Group (JTAG)
The name of the organization that developed standard IEEE 1149.1. This standard defines a
boundary-scan architecture used for in-circuit testing of integrated circuit devices. It is
commonly known by the initials JTAG.
JTAG
See
Joint Test Action Group.
LE
Little endian view of memory in both byte-invariant and word-invariant systems. See also
Byte-invariant, Word-invariant.
Line
See
Cache line.
Little-endian
Byte ordering scheme in which bytes of increasing significance in a data word are stored at
increasing addresses in memory.
See also
Big-endian and Endianness.
Little-endian memory
Memory in which:
- a byte or halfword at a word-aligned address is the least significant byte or halfword within the
word at that address