The PIC16F1768 widens the 176x power-supply family to 20 pins: 7 KB of flash, 512 bytes of SRAM, eighteen I/O lines and a doubled analogue array – two op amps, four high-speed comparators, a twelve-channel 10-bit ADC, two 5-bit and two 10-bit DACs, and two complementary output generators for full-bridge or interleaved stages. Two high-current I/O lines handle 100 mA loads directly. When protection is engaged, our replicate locked PIC16F1768 memory service recovers the image from hardware you own.

Two loops, one capture

With two COGs and two op amps on the die, the common design pattern is two independent control loops – often a main power stage and a secondary LED or fan channel – each tuned by constants streamed from flash into the ramp generators at startup. Replication therefore has to prove both loops, not one: our bench fixture exercises each COG output under load steps and compares switching behaviour against the donor before the clone ships. It is a short test with a long history of catching single-loop images that were reassembled from the wrong sector order. The replicate locked PIC16F1768 memory capture itself follows the family discipline: read the configuration words to map which regions the protection closed, read everything that answers in its protected state in one pass, checksum per sector, and treat the bulk erase that would clear protection as the one path that never runs. Sector re-reading continues until two passes agree, because a power supply’s environment is electrically noisy and we do not guess at marginal bits. Lawful-access framing is in the unlock microcontroller embedded memory guide, and the wider historical context for protection circumvention as a discipline in the microcontroller cracking advancing history article.

Interleaved and full-bridge stages add phase relationships on top of duty cycles, and those phase constants are the subtlest capture targets on this part. Two COGs firing with correct periods but wrong relative phase will cook a transformer slowly enough to pass a bench smoke test and fail in the field. Our load-step comparison therefore samples both COG outputs simultaneously on a two-channel capture, aligning edges against the donor’s reference recording rather than against nominal timing – the difference matters, and the delivered note states which alignment offsets were observed.

The 20-pin QFN option also shapes handling. Its exposed pad bonds to the board’s ground plane for thermal reasons, and donors removed from production units often arrive with the pad solder-wetted into a dome. We dress the pad before any read sequence, because thermal contact shifts the die’s electrical margins enough to matter on marginal flash cells; it is a two-minute step that has rescued more than one marginal read.

Duplication

Verified images are programmed into matching 20-pin blanks with configuration words restored and read-back comparison on every unit, through the MCU flash EEPROM data cloning pipeline. Bounded jobs are described on the partial microcontroller chip cloning page.

The ADC’s computation accumulators add one more capture dimension on this part: where the firmware enables averaging or threshold interrupts, the accumulator windows are configured from flash constants and their effect is only visible over sequences of conversions. Our verification samples the accumulator outputs – not just single conversions – which is how we caught one clone whose averaging window had been half-lengthened by a mis-read word: every individual sample looked right, and only the running average betrayed it.

Family links

The 14-pin members are on the PIC16F1764 program and PIC16F1765 code pages, the 14 KB 20-pin flagship on the PIC16F1769 software recovery, and the 177x generation on the PIC16F1776 MCU page.

Over-current response is measured, not assumed: the comparators’ response time and their programmed trip points decide how the supply survives a shorted output, and our fixture includes a controlled short event captured on both units. Clones whose trip behaviour differed from the donor have been caught this way before they reached a customer’s production line.

Scope and contact

We accept only units you own or are authorised to service. Send the locked PIC16F1768 and we will confirm the package, quote a fixed fee, and return a verified image with both control loops proven.