Emulator Operation

There are two steps to using the MPLAB® REAL ICE™ In-Circuit Emulator system as a debugger:

  1. An application (and the debug executive) must be programmed into the target device.
  2. The internal in-circuit debug hardware of the target Flash device must run and test the application program.

Those two steps are directly related to the following MPLAB X IDE operations:

  1. Programming the code into the target and activating special debug functions.
  2. Debugging the code using features such as breakpoints.

If the target device cannot be programmed correctly, the MPLAB REAL ICE In-Circuit Emulator will not be able to debug.

The figure below shows the basic interconnections required for programming and debugging. For simplicity, the Vdd and Vss lines from the emulator are not shown.

EmulatorProperConnections.jpg
Figure: Proper Connections for Programming

For programming, no clock is needed on the target device, but power must be supplied. When programming, the emulator puts programming levels on Vpp, sends clock pulses on PGC and serial data via PGD. To verify that the part has been programmed correctly, clocks are sent to PGC and data is read back from PGD. This conforms to the In-Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP) protocol of the device under development. See your device programming specification for details.

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