What is the difference between development board and emulator?

Dear all,

What is the difference between development board and emulator?What are
they used for?

Thanks,

Lee <yxl4444@louisiana.edu> says...

>What is the difference between development board and emulator?
>What are they used for?

A development board is the part on a board along with whatever it 
needs to run (crystal, RAM, etc.) and possibly a few extras such
as lights, switches, serial ports, etc.

An emulator plugs into *your* board and acts like the part, but
allows you more control (downloading your programs, single-stepping,
breakpoints, etc.)

>What is the difference between development board and emulator?What are
>they used for?

A development board has the hardware on it to start developing your product.
You can buy such kits around or make one yourself. Many development boards come
with enough chips to talk to a PC through a serial port and have FLASH for your
program and RAM. There are already connectors for hooking to a PC and a
connector for a power supply. There are extra connectors that bring out just
about all the signals so you can hook custom hardware up to it. Some have an
area where you can add your own circuits. Some have extras like some LEDs, or
an LCD, or some push buttons.

The term emulator has changed a bit. Originally it meant a special hardware
device for debugging with a specific processor/microcontroller. You would pull
out the CPU/MCU from your developing product, then plug the emulator into where
the CPU/MCU was. Inside the emulator was a special version of the CPU/MCU with
extra circuitry to enable one to halt, set breakpoints, get/set internal
registers, get/set RAM, and upload/download code.

These days, purely software programs that do the same are refered to as
emulators although the proper term for it is a simulator. Software "emulators"
not only simulate a CPU/MCU but sometimes entire products like videogame
consoles.

"Lee" <yxl4444@louisiana.edu> wrote in message
news:5c3c88bc.0409042024.220aa09b@posting.google.com...
> Dear all,
>
> What is the difference between development board and emulator?What are
> they used for?
>
> Thanks,

Homework?

A Development Board is a group of people who know what they're doing, and
they make technical decisions.

Emulators do the same thing, except they only act like they know what
they're doing.