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The Wikipedia article on in-circuit emulators has no history section.

I didn't have much luck with Google searches either.

I'm wondering how far they date back. When was the first in-circuit emulator produced?

Here's a photo of what I gather is an early Intel ICE. Maybe they had been around for some years before this.

mds ice-80

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I assume you mean microprocessor emulator. There are also PROM emulators, etc. \$\endgroup\$
    – Mattman944
    Commented Sep 25, 2022 at 7:25
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    \$\begingroup\$ They date back at least to the 1980's. I was using an ICE using a bond-out IC from Microchip by 1990/1991, I think. Still have the darned thing sitting above me on a shelf. (And Microchip still supports it, too.) I'm pretty sure it wasn't the first because I was already accustomed to the idea from earlier experiences (Intel 80286, memory serving -- huge blue boxy thing) when I bought it. I was very impressed by the ICE system Intel (massive cube of FPGAs) was using for its own P II development when I worked on the BX chipset, though, some years later. \$\endgroup\$
    – jonk
    Commented Sep 25, 2022 at 9:30
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    \$\begingroup\$ you might have a more knowledgable audience on the Retrocomputing stack \$\endgroup\$
    – Neil_UK
    Commented Sep 25, 2022 at 9:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Neil_UK: Ah I did not notice that the URL here says "electronics" but the site name is "electrical engineering". But there are other ICE questions here. The retro site can be very aggressive at closing questions that seem like a perfect fit so I'm hesitant to ask there. \$\endgroup\$
    – hippietrail
    Commented Sep 25, 2022 at 9:52
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    \$\begingroup\$ As the complexity and speed of MCUs started to grow, it became difficult to impossible to run the emulation in an external box through a long cable, so key parts of the ICE logic were built into the chip itself. External interfaces for this were proprietary at first (using special "bond-out" packages), but then were standardized to use JTAG, which is the current state of the art, along with other industry standards such as SWD (Single/Serial Wire Debug). \$\endgroup\$
    – Dave Tweed
    Commented Sep 25, 2022 at 12:13

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A partial answer: As far as I know the first commercially available in-circuit-emulator (=ICE) for microprocessors was one of the hardware options in Intel MDS 800 for their 8080. It was available in 1975. Unfortunately I do not know if someone had used the idea of ICE earlier without large scale marketing efforts.

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