19 PIC Ultraviolet Unlock
There are a lot of constraints to designing with Microchip’s PIC microcontrollers, but they were very convenient in the early Nineties. It was something like the Arduino of its day, used in both hobby projects and commercial products. Available in mask ROM, (E)PROM, EEPROM, and flash memory variants, it is still being used today. There are many ways to unlock these chips, but in this chapter we’ll focus on using ultraviolet light to clear the fuse bits while somehow protecting the main program memory that we would like to read.
Before EEPROM and flash memory devices were available, developers would purchase chips with a quartz crystal window like the one in Figure 19.1, called the EPROM variant. The single E means that ...
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