Determinarea și evaluarea experimentală a performanțelor microcontrolerelor cu arhitectură pe 8 biți / The experimental determination and evaluation of 8-bit architecture microcontrollers’ performance

This thesis targets the area of evaluating 8-bit architecture microcontrollers. The embedded systems based on microcontrollers are intended to solve certain operations automatically, in the shortest amount of time possible, using as little electric energy as possible. 8-bit microcontrollers are very widespread in most industry applications; in 2019 the global microcontroller market was evaluated at approximately 8 billion dollars and rising. The purpose of this thesis is to describe a new methodology for testing microcontrollers' execution times, drawn current and energy consumption and to perform a study between multiple microcontrollers. The comparative study aims to analyze the microcontrollers' performance and not the used development software. Throughout this thesis I present all the stages needed to obtain reproductible experimental results, starting with the required theoretical knowledge needed to understand and interpret the experimental results, continuing with the test methodology description, both from a hardware and software perspective, ending with the analysis and interpretation of the experimental results. Multiple 8-bit microcontrollers are used and integrated into a comparative study. Some of the main original contributions of this paper are: the identification of the performance parameters, analyzed to reflect real life scenarios; the selection and implementation of the test algorithms; the development of the test methodology so that the measured parameters are not affected by measurement errors; the design and the implementation of the automated systems used for microcontrollers' performance evaluation; the comparative study between the 8-bit microcontrollers used in experiments.