I took on a project last fall that was based on Dallas 80C320. We were to repackage an existing product and update the display technology to a COG LCD module. There was the choice to keep the 'C320 in the design and use a Nohau emulator that the customer already had and I could have taken it on loan. I took a look at its capabilities, the capabilities of the existing microcontroller and the number of chips the existing design had. I ended up going with a Cygnal C8051F126 in the design and ended up being VERY happy with the resulting JTAG debugging. It has turned out to be invaluable to have the JTAG debug capability in each target product. If I had tried the Nohau approach I would have been stuck to only being able to doing development in a single place on a huge prototype that was anchored in place by the rather hefty Nohau emulator pod.

After getting through what ended up being a month of 16 and 20 hour work days in January the project was successfully completed in large part due to how well the Cygnal debugging and IDE system worked with the Keil tool set. As long as there are Cygnal parts I will always do development with them !! ... even if I end up re-targeting the final code to another chip.

Michael Karas