Dear Mike,
in message 3FFDC547.3010302@lucent.com you wrote:
People at my place of work are telling me that the Vision-Ice supports "backtrace" and the BDI2000 does not. I looked on the Abatron website and it doesn't say. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
By "backtrace", I mean the ability to set a breakpoint, hit that breakpoint, and be able to see the last N instructions executed.
I don't know about the Vision-Ice; but I've been working (several years ago) in a project were we spent a lot of $$$ to buy a SuperTAP ICE by Applied Microsystems exactly because they promised this feature. It never worked for us. It didn't work at full processor speed, and the problems where we really wanted a trace did not show up at lower clock speeds. The other setup used a MPC8xx with bus divider enabled (CPU clock = 2 x bus clock). With such a configuration, the CPU does not output the signals you need for the trace on any pins, so you cannot get any trace (no matter which vendor's box you buy).
In my experience, this is marketing babble. For the low level stuff ("simple problems"), a good logic analyzer is at least as capable, and for the highlevel ("complicated") problems it doesn't work anyway, and a plain BDM/JTAG debugger plus a little brain and a lot of experience gives beter results.
Just my $ 0.02 - ymmv.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk