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!