I before talked with some experienced engineers and found that a fairly part of them didn’t use or seldom used Emulator. When asking them why, they just simple answered “It is uncertaintyâ€
If they don’t use JTAG Emulator, I suppose they might follow the steps below to develop their programs:
(1) According to their project, first, they might build a hardware platform which will meet their requirements. If programs are very complicated, they will build an interface for human-computer interaction like a simple LED, a buzzer or ever LCD display.
(2) Write a very simple program, such as light up a led, and keep it blink. Then compile the program and burn it to the chip to verify whether their hardware platform is normal or not.
(3) After the hardware platform is OK, they will start to write the driver programs of the system, but each modification of programs will lead to reburn the programs to chips to verify the chips right or wrong. If there are problems during verifying programs, they might use some debugging methods; for example, send some message to the hypeterminal of the PC through a serial interface to check the running statements of programs.
(4) After that, they will start to write the specific user applications, this section will not refer to the hardware problem, so normally, those questions which appear in programs will be found out.
I hope the above information will solve your question that why engineers don’t use JTAG Emulator.
Thanks Daniel_je. Could you please recommend a JTAG Emulator for arm cortex-m3 processors?
Well, there is a cheap JTAG Emulator but with high performance, it mainly debugs the ARM Cortex-M3 processors through Keil Realview MDK and IAR EWARM. Here is this link: http://www.embedinfo.com/en/list.asp?id=42.