Here i try to talk about a widely misunderstood topic. It is about Emulators, Simulators and Debuggers.
For starters, these three are different things and have different ways of operation and capabilities but have a common intent. Helping the embedded developer, develop his software in a more robust way with lesser number of bugs.
Lets start with the most common one, Simulator. A simulator is a software that runs on the host pc ( Your personal computer), and is able to mimic some/all of the behavior of micro controller. I use the term µC because that is what we will be dealing more in the future posts. However, this is equally applicable to the µC too. Some/all is in bold because simulators often cannot mimic all the functionalities that can occur in the real hardware. Some of the very good simulators i have seen are the AVR simulators. This should be available to you if you download AVR studio which i discussed in my earlier post here.
Next is a Debugger. A debugger is a device ( Typically an external peice of hardware connected to your PC via a serial link like USB) which talks to your µC and provides information to the host PC which is displayed in some kind of a debugging environment. Often the external hardware debugger is accompanied with a PC envirnonment to debug it and people confuse this environment to be the debugger. Unfortunately, that is incorrect. E.g of Debuggers
It should be obvious that to really use a debugger u needed a µC to which you can talk to. Without having a µC ( often called Target), there is not much you can do with a debugger.
Finally we have the Emulator. This is where everyone gets confused. An Emulator emulates the functionality of the µC. This means that the real µC is not present in the system. This is in contrast with the Debugger which requires an external µC to really talk to. Since, the Emulator emulates the functionality of the µC, there is no need for an extra µC. The question now arises why do we need an Emulator at all if we have a debugger? Why take pains to emulate the functionality of the micro when we already have it available?
Answer
Costwise, typically simulators are cheap, Debuggers are costly and Emulators are very costly. Also, for debuggers to exist the µC should provide some kind of debug interface ( remember the debugger needs to talk to the micro!!). We will talk about debug interfaces in one of the future posts.
I hope this post helps people to lose some myths about the three components.
Wanna add your point or provide additional info ? Please leave your comment. You can subscribe to this blog by using the links under "Subscribe" section.
For starters, these three are different things and have different ways of operation and capabilities but have a common intent. Helping the embedded developer, develop his software in a more robust way with lesser number of bugs.
Lets start with the most common one, Simulator. A simulator is a software that runs on the host pc ( Your personal computer), and is able to mimic some/all of the behavior of micro controller. I use the term µC because that is what we will be dealing more in the future posts. However, this is equally applicable to the µC too. Some/all is in bold because simulators often cannot mimic all the functionalities that can occur in the real hardware. Some of the very good simulators i have seen are the AVR simulators. This should be available to you if you download AVR studio which i discussed in my earlier post here.
Next is a Debugger. A debugger is a device ( Typically an external peice of hardware connected to your PC via a serial link like USB) which talks to your µC and provides information to the host PC which is displayed in some kind of a debugging environment. Often the external hardware debugger is accompanied with a PC envirnonment to debug it and people confuse this environment to be the debugger. Unfortunately, that is incorrect. E.g of Debuggers
- Nec Mini Cube with IEQB850 as the debugging environment
- ATMEL -ICE with AVR studio as the debugging environment.
It should be obvious that to really use a debugger u needed a µC to which you can talk to. Without having a µC ( often called Target), there is not much you can do with a debugger.
Finally we have the Emulator. This is where everyone gets confused. An Emulator emulates the functionality of the µC. This means that the real µC is not present in the system. This is in contrast with the Debugger which requires an external µC to really talk to. Since, the Emulator emulates the functionality of the µC, there is no need for an extra µC. The question now arises why do we need an Emulator at all if we have a debugger? Why take pains to emulate the functionality of the micro when we already have it available?
Answer
- Often the real micro controller will be in developmental stages, while companies still want to use them. So Micro vendors like NEC come up with Emulators.
- Emulators can have more debugging capabilities compared to the real µC.
- Since, the Emulator is emulating the µC, it can be reconfigured via different means ( we will discuss this else where) to emulate more than one type of µC ( of course, not at the same time!!).
Costwise, typically simulators are cheap, Debuggers are costly and Emulators are very costly. Also, for debuggers to exist the µC should provide some kind of debug interface ( remember the debugger needs to talk to the micro!!). We will talk about debug interfaces in one of the future posts.
I hope this post helps people to lose some myths about the three components.
Wanna add your point or provide additional info ? Please leave your comment. You can subscribe to this blog by using the links under "Subscribe" section.
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Eye opener :D
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