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Reasons to forget your ICE.

  • Difficult for teamwork: often only one emulator available; many users.
  • Maintenance problems. Hard to maintain and repair.
  • Expensive. Small companies get married with a particular micro.
  • Gallery of hardware gadgets (probes, adapters, sockets...) which cause many contact problems.
  • Packages ever decreasing in size; increasing pin count.... increasing connection problems.
  • Closed loop systems: can we put a breakpoint to stop the whole system ?
  • Systems-on-silicon design. Where do we plug the emulator ?
  • New trend: configurable microcontrollers: can you re-configure an ICE ?

Murphy laws about ICEs

  • An emulator improperly connected will become always damaged by the circuit under development. Such circuit will get no damage at all.
  • In Europe, an emulator always needs to be shipped to the US to be repaired. In such reparation, it will always need an spare part to be ordered from Japan.
  • The package for a microcontroller is always decided to be DIL, five minutes before opening the box of its corresponding brand new emulator ordered with a PLCC or FlatPack probe.
  • The delivery time for the right probe is directly proportional to its need, in the eventual case that has not been obsoleted by the manufacturer.
  • Real-time emulators are so good, that is the unique way to make the system going, making everything else fail, including the real micro.
  • Code lines cause a gravity force over break-points directly proportional to the damage they can produce in the external circuit if the process is stopped.
  • The emulator ground and the system ground will have a voltage difference proportional to the number of components that can be blown up when shorted.

Come to the XXI  Century. Use VMLAB!


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