The XMC4500 integrates a state-of-the-art processor at its core as well as a broad range of highly configurable and powerful peripheral hardware units. This renders this micro-controller to be fairly complex for a novice programmer and it took a considerable amount of time to become familiar with just a sub-set of the possibilities this controller offers. Therefore the following sub sections are going to provide a short overview and introduction into some selected features of the micro-controller which are, alongside others, used by the developed firmware.
This micro-controller integrates an ARM  Cortex-M4F 32bit processor  that can be clocked to up to 120MHz and implements the ARMv7-M architecture . It is an extended derivative of the Cortex-M4 which utilizes an additional IEEE754-compliant  single-precision hardware floating-point unit (FPU) therefore the "F" post-fix. A conceptual block diagram of this processors core is shown in figure 1.
Its instruction set includes special single instruction multiple data (SIMD), single cycle multiply-and-accumulate, saturating arithmetic and hardware division instructions. These features provide high computational efficiency and resemble many of the distinct features of dedicated digital signal processors (DSP). That is why this group of instructions is often recalled in literature as a DSP instruction set. If appropriate algorithms have been implemented these instructions are able to increase the computational performance of the processor for certain applications significantly. As the processor core needs additional hardware to actually provide any useful output the following sub-sections will explain the functionality of selected built-in components of the Cortex-M4 core.
The content of his chapter is taken from the master thesis "Development of a low-cost micro-controller based oscilloscope including equivalent time sampling" by Ing. Harald Schloffer, MSc, November 2016.
arm: Architecting a Smarter World - arm [Online] http://www.arm.com
ARM LTD.: Cortex-M4 Technical Reference Manual r0p0 ed., March 2010
ARM LTD.: ARMv7-M Architecture Reference Manual 6 ed., December 2014
IEEE754-2008 - IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, August 2008