The Stellaris LM3S family of ARM® Cortex™-M3 microcontrollers from Texas Instruments were the first Cortex-M3 silicon implementation available anywhere. The LM3S devices allow embedded microcontroller system designers, for the first time, to fully realize 32-bit performance for the same price as their 8- and 16-bit microcontroller designs. Additionally, applications with the LM3S family enable full access to the industry’s strongest support ecosystem of tools, silicon, and software, and offer instruction-set compatible performance from $1 to 1 GHz.

TI’s Stellaris LM3S series of microcontrollers (MCUs) are based on the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller version.  Cortex-M3 has been optimized for single-cycle flash usage, which provides outstanding performance.  Cortex-M3 is also the only ARM processor core with deterministic interrupt processing, a required feature in deeply-embedded microcontroller applications, and offers other features especially for the microcontroller market:  most importantly, the LM3S devices require no assembly code – everything can be done in C!  Stellaris LM3S MCUs typically demonstrate performance that is at least 2 to 4 times faster on typical control applications using half the flash memory for the same code.