User Manual For CYCLONE Programmers
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13
AUTOMATIC SERIAL NUMBER MECHANISM
When producing a microcontroller- or microprocessor-based product, it is often useful to program
a unique serial number into the permanent memory (FLASH) of the product.
PEmicro has developed a serial number mechanism to automate this process. Each time you
issue a serialization command in the programming software, the current serial number is
programmed at a specified address. In addition, the serial number is incremented to the next
available serial number and saved for future serialized programming operations.
The Cyclone adopts this automatic serial number mechanism for its stand-alone operations.
13.1
Understanding Serialization
The automatic serial number mechanism supports serial numbers from 1 to 16 bytes in length.
Each byte of a serial number ranges between a lower and an upper bound. This approach allows
the individual bytes of the serial number to have distinct properties. Some of the forms these
properties can take are:
Type
Lower Bound (hex)
Upper Bound (hex)
Constant
Constant
Constant
Binary
00
FF
ASCII Printable
20
7E
ASCII Numeric
30
39
ASCII Upper Case Letter
41
5A
ASCII Lower Case Letter
61
7A
Other
XX
YY
Each serial number and its properties are stored in a separate file. Any file name can be used for
the serial number file, however the extension .ser is normally appended because it makes it
simpler to locate the file.
A utility called SERIALIZE has been developed to make it easy to create, visualize, edit, and
maintain these serial number files.
13.2
Serialize Utility
This section is a modified excerpt from PEmicro’s Serialize Help File and explains the Serialize
utility in detail.
