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Setup:

Arduino Uno (ATMega328P Microcontroller) running inline assembly instructions using asm statements. Global interrupts disabled. Pin 13 (PORTB5), DDRB5 designated as output used for trigger event for oscilloscope. The oscilloscope is measuring voltage drop of resistor soldered to VCC on microcontroller and using pin 13 toggle as trigger event. Clock of microcontroller is 16MHZ and the oscilloscope is sampling at 1.25GHZ.

Issue:

The traces acquired from the setup above are relatively uniform. However, they give some odd behaviour causing some errors in my analysis. Every 8 or 16 clock cycles, the waveform will peak on the trailing edge. Reading documentation of the microcontroller about the fetch-load-execute cycle does not lead to any nice conclusions. Has anyone else encountered this issue?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ What specific code is the microcontroller running? \$\endgroup\$
    – user39382
    Commented Jul 24, 2018 at 22:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ Would you like me to post a picture as well? \$\endgroup\$
    – Mir
    Commented Jul 24, 2018 at 22:34
  • \$\begingroup\$ @duskwuff I have posted code snippets. Take a look. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mir
    Commented Jul 24, 2018 at 22:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ An artifact from sampling? \$\endgroup\$
    – Janka
    Commented Jul 24, 2018 at 23:12
  • \$\begingroup\$ Do you have any examples come to mind? The trace above is averaged from 25,000 traces, so I would assume any artifacts would be smoothed out. The large peaks occur deterministically and continuously through a trace 50,000 data points long as well as other instruction traces. The 'artifact from sampling' repeating with such precision seems too peculiar. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mir
    Commented Jul 24, 2018 at 23:17

1 Answer 1

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My suspicion would be that it has nothing to do with the instructions at all. Something else in the microcontroller is becoming active every 8 and/or 16 clock cycles.

A couple of possibilities that come to mind are:

  • A timer/counter peripheral has its clock prescaler set to 8.

  • One of the timer/counter peripherals is rolling over every 8 or 16 clock cycles.

  • The SPI peripheral has its clock prescaler set to 16.

  • The TWI (aka. I2C) peripheral has its clock prescaler set to 16.

  • The CKDIV8 fuse is programmed.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Thank you for giving an answer. I will research these and come back with an update. I also agree with your assumption it has nothing to do with the instructions. Viewing the compiled code hex dump reveals there are no instructions partitioning the block of adds instructions. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mir
    Commented Jul 25, 2018 at 12:50
  • \$\begingroup\$ Quick update: I am looking into all the hardware components and attempting to turn off unnecessary peripherals with the Low Power library. Once completed, I will come back with more details. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mir
    Commented Jul 26, 2018 at 21:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ Turned off all timer peripherals, TWI, SPI and the data remains consistent. Will check alignment issues above hinted by @Janka. Thank you again for the ideas. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mir
    Commented Jul 30, 2018 at 14:32

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