Thursday, April 9, 2020

HPC Microcontroller Development System

A while back I acquired this interesting piece of hardware. I knew it was an in circuit emulator (ICE) but didn’t know much more about it. In this and upcoming posts I plan to take a detailed look at this device.


An ICE is a device used in the development of microprocessor based systems. It plugs in in place of the microprocessor/microcontroller and allows software to be transferred to the system under development from a host system. It also normally has a series of debugging features, for example the ability to single step code, view and edit memory, set break points, etc.

This particular ICE is for the National Semiconductor HPC series microcontroller. The HPC series was released in the late 80’s and was a 16 bit microcontroller with on-chip RAM, ROM and various peripherals.




You can find information about this processer in the databook on Bitsavers:

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/components/national/_dataBooks/1989_National_Microcontroller_Databook.pdf

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