Alignment
Since the PIC32MZ memory system is 32-bits wide, a data access that is 32-bit (4-bytes, or word), or 16-bit (2-bytes, or half word) in size can either be aligned or unaligned:
(Naturally) Aligned Transfer: means that the data's address value is a multiple of the data's type-size (in bytes)
- Word size transfers are carried out to addresses that are a multiple of 4: 0x00000000, 0x00000004, 0x00000008, …
- Half word size transfers are carried out to addresses that are a multiple of 2: 0x00000000, 0x00000002, 0x00000004,
Unaligned Transfer: means that the data's address does not follow the rules above.
All MIPS architectures prior to Release 5 require "naturally" aligned transfers for normal load/store operations. Unaligned accesses using normal load/store operations will produce exceptions.
In most cases, C-compilers do not generate unaligned data accesses. It can only happen in:
- Direct manipulation of pointers
- Accessing data structures with __packed attributes that contain unaligned data
- Inline/Embedded Assembly code
Several examples of "naturally" aligned and unaligned data transfers are shown below for a MIPS32 Little-Endian memory system:
