HP 1660CS-Series User Manual page 239

System Performance Analysis (SPA) Software
SPA measurement processes
Measurement example using all three trace modes
In a 32-bit microprocessor system, you want to determine how efficiently the
CPU is being utilized. Critical questions might be: are any processes
consuming excessive processing time, are any processes getting stuck in wait
loops, and is the system handling service calls and interrupts efficiently?
You connect the HP logic analyzer to the address bus of your system. In the
Format Specification, you define a 32-bit label called ADDR and the state
clocking. In many cases, HP provides preprocessors, inverse assemblers and
standard configurations for popular microprocessors, and you need not enter
the configuration manually or worry about probing issues.
In the State Overview mode, you select the ADDR label and start the
acquisition to monitor the entire memory space. After several acquisitions,
five areas of relatively high activity begin to build on the histogram. Using
the X and O markers to determine the address boundaries of these five
regions, you quickly recognize two programs, a delay routine in the operating
system kernel, and a keyboard interrupt routine. The figure below shows the
State Overview display.
SPA State Overview
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