The PIC16F1937 is the full-featured 40/44-pin member of the 193x LCD generation: 8192 words (14 KB) of flash, 512 bytes of SRAM, 256 bytes of EEPROM, thirty-six I/O lines, sixteen capacitive-touch channels, a fourteen-channel 10-bit ADC, three enhanced CCP modules paired with two plain CCP, and the ninety-six-pixel LCD driver that spans four commons. Industrial panels reach for it when a display, a touch surface and a few actuator channels have to live on the same die. When protection is engaged, our dump secured PIC16F1937 EEPROM service recovers the code, the data EEPROM and the configuration words from hardware you own.

Three ECCP outputs and their steering

With three enhanced CCP modules, panel firmware typically runs several PWM channels at once – backlight, buzzer, actuator – and steers them through the ECCP steering registers at runtime. The steering map is loaded from flash constants, so a clone carrying the right code but stale steering data drives the wrong pins at the wrong moments. Verification therefore captures the powered register state alongside the arrays and exercises every steered output against the donor’s recorded behaviour before delivery. The touch layer gets the same treatment: sixteen channels mean trim tables that were tuned on the production line, and raw count comparisons between clone and donor catch a mis-captured table immediately. The storage architecture that holds all of this is laid out in the microcontroller internal storage structure analysis reference.

Service-mode key sequences are constants too, and panel products keep them deliberately obscure: which button order enters calibration, what timing the watchdog expects, which pin must wiggle to defeat a lockout. They live in flash beside the application and they are part of the image as much as the control loop is. Our capture keeps them in place – it is not our place to publish a product’s service backdoors – and the report simply notes that they are present and verified, so the owner’s own documentation and the delivered image agree.

EEPROM is the operational memory

On panel products the 256-byte EEPROM is where the device keeps its running personality – setpoints, service counters, calibration offsets. A dump that stops at flash is half a job: the replacement boots with defaults and the customer’s settings are gone. The capture therefore takes code and EEPROM in the same protected-state session, checksums each, and re-reads until two passes agree; the report prints both checksums side by side. Reading the policy starts at the configuration words, where code protect and data protect stand in the way of external reads; the single action that would release them – a bulk erase – also wipes the array, so it is never used. The wider commercial boundary is framed in the semiconductor chip hardware security overview.

Panel donors in practice

Forty-four-pin TQFP donors from field panels often arrive with years of heat and vibration behind them, and the usual failure is a marginal socket contact during the long capture rather than anything exotic. Sessions are kept short, leads inspected under magnification, and the re-read requirement is enforced precisely because these arrays live in noisy electrical environments. The discipline pays for itself the first time a second pass catches a flipped bit that a single read would have shipped. Related LCD-generation work is described on the PIC16F18046 memory page.

Short capture sessions earn their keep on these panels specifically: the surrounding board – backlights, relay coils, switched-mode rails – is electrically loud, and a long single-pass read is where marginal bits escape. Two agreeing passes over short sessions have been the difference between a clean recovery and a unit that had to be re-sent, which costs a week.

Duplication and family

Each verified dump is written to a matching 40/44-pin blank with the EEPROM and configuration words put back in place, then read back unit by unit through the MCU flash EEPROM data cloning pipeline. The 28-pin 14 KB member is on the PIC16F1936 source code page and the 28 KB upgrade on the PIC16F1938 heximal recovery.

Scope

Engagements cover only parts you own or are cleared to work on. Send the locked PIC16F1937 and you get back a verified dump, the steering and touch verification logs, and the protection map.