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!