An Advanced Debugger for the 68HC16 family of microcontrollers as a powerful tool for the development of new products, testing and design

Abstract

The present article describes a specialized in-circuit debugging software named "Advanced Debugger" (DA for its initials in Spanish) for Motorola's 68HC16 family of microcontrollers. This Advanced Debugger is capable of editing and debugging programs, and also it can monitor and control the microcontroller operation via the background debugging mode (BDM). Debugging of programs with the DA is made with the use of BDM's set of commands and communication protocol, and through the handling of variables stored in memory locations, general-purpose registers, and internal registers. The DA permits total access at any time of the mentioned memory locations and registers, even the microcontroller's internal control registers. Some current debuggers do not access internal registers due to BDM's design limitations and programming complexity of the debugger. This Advanced Debugger is very powerful because it does not require the program to be recompiled every time it is needed to change the values of variables that access the internal registers and by consequence, the process does not have to be stopped to trace the error. Even more, the DA allows testing the microcontroller operation without the need of writing a single line of code. This paper is not intended to explain the design or programming of the Advanced Debugger, but to show its broad line of applications.