Emulator speeds RISC development

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Jun 6, 2003

NEC's new IE-V850ES-G1 is an emulation system used to effectively debug hardware and software during development of systems using V850ES microcontrollers.

NEC's new IE-V850ES-G1 is an emulation system used to effectively debug hardware and software during development of systems using V850ES microcontrollers.

By connecting it to the hardware emulation board (sold separately), the IE-V850ES-G1 can also be used as an in-circuit emulator (ICE) for V850ES series microcontrollers to facilitate performance optimisation.

Basic specifications of the V850ES emulator include an emulation memory capacity of 1Mbyte internal ROM and 4Mbyte of external memory, plus a trace memory capacity of 168 x 32K frames.

A built in timer/counter function allows time measurement with time tag and timers (three units).

Using an external logic probe, an 8bit external trace pattern can be used, and various combinations of events for trace/break can be set.

Several alternative break functions can be chosen, including event, step, forced and fail-safe (eg for illegal access to peripherals I/O, writing to ROM area, and so on).

The IE-V850ES-G1 emulator has a maximum operation frequency of 20MHz (at 3.3V operation).

Depending on the specific emulation board used, some of the device pin functions can be masked to allow correct functionality of the target design to be tested during system development.

Maskable pins include reset, wait, HLDRQ and NMI pin.

The IE-V850ES-G1 can be operated in conjunction with a host PC by inserting a dedicated interface board in the expansion slot of the host machine.

A choice of interface boards in PCI or ISAbus formats are available.

A broad range of PC-based software development tools are also available.