Time measurement techniques for microcontroller performance analysis

The most frequent performance evaluation for a CPU (Central Processing Unit), be it a standalone CPU or a microcontroller integrated CPU, is the amount of time needed to perform a certain task or to execute a certain algorithm. This paper presents an analysis of different time measurement techniques for microcontroller CPU instructions execution. This analysis is based mainly on the time measurement errors that could appear in the presented measurement methods and also this paper describes the algorithms used in these experiments to create the CPU load. Also, in the experimental results section there is a short comparison between two microcontrollers as a proof of concept. The original contributions to this paper are: the design of the testing setup, both hardware and software, the developing of the software for the microcontrollers used in the experiment and most importantly, the experimental results regarding the presented measurement techniques.