I am curious. Regardless how an ICE compares to JTAG, BDM, etc., you seem to consider it a viable option today.
I have not used a "real" ICE since the 8080/Z80/6800 days. I don't recall even seeing an ICE for at least the last twelve years in the places I worked or visited. (Excluding web pages for old equipment sold at eBay)
Are In Circuit Emulators still part of an embedded developer's toolkit? What companies manufacture them, for what processor families?
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I'm pretty sure it's down to too strict timing requirements in Keil's software. For the same reason it can be difficult getting debug interfaces to work in virtual machines. IIRC Keil's interfaces use the host class drivers and don't need custom drivers installed (eg. you can install the IDE and start debugging without rebooting the machine inbetween).
Me too. The 68HC11 was the last target with which I used "real" ICE.
Nope.
Don't know.
None of the ones I've used in the last decade had "real" ICE available. Many of them had JTAG, but that's strictly HW breakpoint, examine memory, and single-step. No tracing.
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The last ice used here (last year) was the Renesas unit for the 32c87 series, but must have been at least 10 years since i've seen or used ice otherwise. The Renasas device was a set of pcb's plugged together that needed a special adapter socket on the pcb, so the first few prototype boards were non standard build using the (expensive) special adapters. They were fragile / top heavy to the point that I had to epoxy the adapters to the board for adequate mechanical rigidity. Different boards within the set for different devices within the processor family. It worked, but at over 1000 ukp each, a bit expensive when all I really needed was code download, run, single step and occasional variable and structure examination. The software was good though, shall we say "feature rich", with regular and free updates from Renesas.
I think the main drive comes from manufacturers, to get critical mass, with low cost starter kits the way forward to get a cpu family into wide acceptance. Target hardware kits are often 100 ukp or less, including quality, limited size toolchains. Hardware emulators at
1000's don't fit into that picture, especially when lower cost jtag style solutions get 90% of the job done at a fraction of the cost. Any remaining hardware issues can be dealt with more effectively using a scope or logic analyser with a few lines of added code where necessary...
Many ARM processors contain an embedded trace module. When Keil introduced their ULINKpro debug interface, one of the features they pushed was realtime instruction tracing for Cortex-M devices.
It /can/ be nice, but in reality you don't often have need for tracing. I certainly seldom used it in the old days of using "real" ICE's. On the other hand, when you /do/ have use for tracing, it can save a lot of time in debugging.
But tracing is an expensive feature, especially if you only have use of it once a year. If you have a team of 10 Cortex programmers, it could make sense to have one expensive debugger (such as the ULINKpro, if you are using Keil tools) shared in the team, and an ordinary jtag debugger for each programmer for normal use. But if you are working by yourself, it would be hard to justify the price based solely on the trace feature.
Tracing has also become far less useful since it became standard to include some hardware data watchpoints, as well as code breakpoints.
To be honest, I probably used tracing more for tracking down hardware problems (spurious interrupts, that sort of thing) than for tracking down software bugs.
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Well, that would tend to depend on how real an ICE has to be for you to consider it a "real" one...
I'm pretty sure a pretty realistic ICE (you know, as in: somewhat clunky box with a many-a-pole flat cable coming out of it that ends in a plug that fits a socket which could otherwise hold an actual CPU) has been in use in our shop this year. At least I know who last used it.
The whole thing is for a Fujitsu 16FX series processor. And yes, it's worth having it in the toolkit.
That only happens with dirt-cheap RS-232 dongles without serial numbers. Windows has no way of recognising it has 'seen' this before so the COM port number will be tied to the USB port. As soon as you spend a little more on a RS-232 dongle with a serial number, windows will recognise it the next time regardless of which USB port it is plugged into, and assign the same COM port number again. The FTDI RS-232 converters are a good example of this.
Absolutely. Not all MCU have JTAG or BDM Also not all MCU have ICE
Well as I know several ICE manufacturers whilst they are not selling as many due to the growth in ARM and hence JTAG there are still a lot of people using ICE where they are available.
However new technologies are coming on stream like SWD for Cortex which are purpose designed debug solutions a generation on from JTAG.
They should be where appropriate.
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There are half a dozen others at a similar level
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Not only "new" debug interfaces are "purpose designed", look at the single wire "BDM" interface by Motorola. I don't remember exactly when I started using it, but I think it was more than ten years ago (HC12, "SDI" interface).
Like Nohau... I remember them being ardent ICE advocates. How many _new_ ICE products did all the manufacturers bring out recently?
If you are using a hub, does the "quality" of the hub have anything to do with it? I have a FPGA programming adapter that works ok in any USB port on my machine, but refuses to work when plugged into a hub. I only have two hubs around and they are both min price units. In fact, I plug in the hub and it shows up in device manager as a "generic hub". If the programming adapter is then plugged into the hub not only does the adapter not show up, the generic hub goes away and an "unknown device" appears.
Would this be likely to work correctly if I were to get a "better" hub? FTDI doesn't make hub chips. How can I identify a high quality USB hub?
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I think so. I have no experience woth dirt-cheap $1 hubs, but I know that the I have handles for of my devices using an FT232R perfectly. Always the same com ports. I even tried connecting four devices to that hub and then connecting the hub to the PC, so the PC would see four similar new devices at once. No sweat.
Could it be that modern dirt-cheap hubs don't follow the USB specs and just act as a semi-intelligent USB four-way switch? Just to cut on silicon cost?
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