busTRACE This WEB page comes from the busTRACE 9.0 User's Manual. (Table of Contents)

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One of the key features of busTRACE 9.0 is its ability to capture I/O activity on a Windows PC. Prior to a software bus analyzer, such as busTRACE, an engineer's only option was to use a hardware bus analyzer.

Customers often wonder about the differences between a hardware bus analyzer and busTRACE. Comparing hardware analyzers to busTRACE is not a direct comparison as they are capturing I/O activity from two different perspectives. A hardware analyzer looks at the I/O activity from the hardware perspective (i.e. the actual physical bus itself). A software bus analyzer looks at the I/O activity from the operating system's perspective.

How do you choose whether to use a product like busTRACE, a hardware bus analyzer, or both? The answer to that really depends on what your bus analysis needs are. If you need low-level hand-shaking information, between a host and target, then a hardware analyzer would be more appropriate. If you need to view the commands and data sent between the host and target, then busTRACE would be more appropriate.

With our customers, we find that they use busTRACE as their daily bus analysis tool. It is also in use by more of their engineers. For those cases where low-level bus analysis is required, such as during initial product development, they would turn to a hardware bus analyzer.