Debuggers

These provide a link to your target board that implements a debugging environment. In general they rely on a communications connection between the target board and the PC. In modern chips this is provided by a Background Debug Mode (BDM or JTAG) link but in it's simplest form this can be the built-in serial port of the microcontroller. Code to be debugged can be downloaded via this communications link to RAM/Flash on the target. With the code now in the target breakpoints may be inserted and the values held in registers, variables etc can be displayed on the PC and the user can even run or single step through the application.

Freescale BDM/SDI

Hardware on the 68HCS08, 68HC(S)12, HC16, CPU32, MCORE, ColdFire and Power PC processors uses a small number of pins to communicate with built-in debug facilities on the chip. A monitor on the PC interacts via the BDM to provide Reading and writing Abatron supply some very fast interfaces using this technique and P & E provide a very low-cost solution.  Many of the 68HC08 chips include an on chip monitor MON08 and P&E's MON08 board interfaces to it both for development and programming purposes.

JTAG

Like BDM/SDI this requires specific hardware support on the chip. JTAG was originally devised to provides a mechanism for testing and programming complex components such as PLDs and Flash memories in situ and in this case it is used to communicate with a part of the CPU that can start and stop execution as well as accessing the busses. It looks like it's the way ICE support is going as CPUs are getting faster and more complex while bondout chips are just not available. Abatron and iSYSTEMS both provide JTAG ports for ARM, PPC and MIPS. These interfaces are often used with GDB the debugger supplied with the GCC compiler

CMX - Bug

A utility supplied with CMX, it uses a task running a link to a PC to monitor that displays the details of application tasks while they are running.

CMX-Tracker

A CMX option that logs all calls to the real-time executive and then allows a task , that talks to a PC via a serial port, to review details of all the task interactions.

Grammar Engines

A ROM emulator with a built-in serial channel. Not by itself a monitor, but support is available to use its serial channel instead of the standard (but often unavailable) UART to link to a number of popular ROM based monitors including Paradigm for 8086/186, X-Ray for 68000 and the GNU debugger.

chipFORTH

This has a monitor which only takes 256 bytes (no we did not miss a decimal point) this provides the fully interactive development much beloved by FORTH aficionados. Uses the serial port built into the microcontroller but cleverly re-directs target UART output to the PC's screen.