Simulation is great when there is no hardware

absolutely, for simultaneous development you can not emulate, but if the HW developers are that slow, you have other problems :-)

Actually, I wasn't talking abouit slow hardware developers. Some of the embedded systems I've worked on were too big to fit in my office.

or when you want to determine what the hardware should actually look like.

huh?

Under simulation, I can test a lot of ideas as to the best A/D convert to use or the best way to interface to a particular piece of hardware. Shoud I memory map it, is dual-port RAM REALLY needed, and so on. Should I hook up this signal to an external interrupt or can I poll it fast enough and use the interrupt for something else. I can answer these questions all under simulation without building hardware.


With a simulator, you control time. When you stop the simulation, you stop everything, the program counter, the oscillator, interrupts -- everything. Nothing is running in the background.

So you do when emulation (except the oscillator)

Except, if you have hardware that REQUIRES that the processor runs or external hardware that generates interrupts, you cannot stop those. One system I worked on had a limitation that you could not stop the emulator for more than 1 minute.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that emulators are bad. I've used almost every 8051 emulator there is (I mean we have everyone's emulator here at Keil). I've just found that many problems can be solved with the simulator.

Jon