Posted on October 28, 2003 at 06:08You can use emulator and programmer for developing your application. You can also use starterkit for programming and emulating small softwares. You can even make your small application without emualtor but that will make debugging complex and will take a lot of time.
All the boards that you mentioned have their advantages.Explained below a small introduction with all board indicating their advantages.
Evaluation Board provides a ready to run platform for running ST6 software. It evaluate quickly and easily the capabilities of aST6 microcontrollers.
Starter kit is a very useful, easy to use and cheap tool .It can be used in many ways like
1.As a programmer.
2.as an application board for some devices.
3.as a software simulator.
4.for In-circuit-Programming.
Emulator and Dedicated Board:
Emulator is used to control the execution of programs that have been written for the series of MCUs (supported by the Emulator) and assists in debugging the application hardware as well as software.
The real-time capability of the emulator allows to run the application at full speed still under debugger control. The emulator is principally (like ST62GP-EMU2) made up of two boards :
(I) The Dedicated board
(II)The Main board
The main board is common to all emulators .It emulates the microcontroller’s Program memory and contains the breakpoint logic, trace memory and all the logic needed for real timer emulation.
The dedicated board applies to the set of specific devices and emulates all peripheral related to these devices (RAM, EEPROM, ADC, Timers, I/Os etc). To emulate the devices which are not in the list of particular dedicated board, you have to change the dedicated board,but ST62GP-EMU2 covers all the ST6 series(except ST624X) of microcontrollers with one dedicated board.
