INTRODUCTION

Many applications require the microcontroller to calculate a checksum on the program memory to determine if the contents have been corrupted. Until now, the only family of PICmicro® microcontrollers to have the capability to read from program memory are the PIC17CXXX devices. The PIC16F87X devices are the first 14-bit core PICmicro microcontrollers that are able to access program memory in the same fashion as used with data EEPROM memory. These devices are FLASH extensions of the popular PIC16C7X family. Table 1 shows a comparison between the two PICmicro microcontroller families.