Anyone can make their own emulator. The ISA is publicly documented, and MCU datasheets are also public. There are also open source emulators like Renode and QEMU, like we wrote in our post. I would say there are two main differences between us and you using Claude to make its own emulator:
1. Although the ISA and peripheral behavior for the MCUs are documented, there are hardware intricacies that can't be effectively done with just an LLM. Things like register transaction timings, and hardware bugs (yes chip designers make mistakes in designs that aren't shown in documentation) requires many weeks of constant bench testing to detect and fix.
2. Maintenance. Yes, Claude is incredibly good. But it still makes mistakes. We understand that, and we're always making updates to our simulation software whenever there is a bug. You however, as a firmware engineer whose job is to make products and ship code, I would assume you would rather work on that instead spending all day fixing and updating a simulator. We do the maintenance for you, so you can focus on building your things.
Hope that answers your question! We're not claiming that AI can't do it with enough time and resources. It's just that the people who find value in this would rather spend their time on other things.
1. Although the ISA and peripheral behavior for the MCUs are documented, there are hardware intricacies that can't be effectively done with just an LLM. Things like register transaction timings, and hardware bugs (yes chip designers make mistakes in designs that aren't shown in documentation) requires many weeks of constant bench testing to detect and fix.
2. Maintenance. Yes, Claude is incredibly good. But it still makes mistakes. We understand that, and we're always making updates to our simulation software whenever there is a bug. You however, as a firmware engineer whose job is to make products and ship code, I would assume you would rather work on that instead spending all day fixing and updating a simulator. We do the maintenance for you, so you can focus on building your things.
Hope that answers your question! We're not claiming that AI can't do it with enough time and resources. It's just that the people who find value in this would rather spend their time on other things.