Hello Adam.  Thanks for taking the time to write.  We did design for the 77,
we knew of its very poor (non-existent?) code protection of FLASH memory,
but chose the part anyway, took a gamble that the 77A would be available by
go time, but it's not.  We never knew that even code protected flash was
readable by internal reads, meaning that any amateur hacker could put on
code to do a memory dump of the code protected area.  That is the achilles
heel we didn't know about.  That seems quite ridiculous, and in fact, is.

The 77A was due out long ago, and is quite far delayed into the future, so
now we are stuck with a poorly designed part.  To say it's not microchip's
fault is quite remarkable, given that the ONLY part of the chip that's not a
commodity is the ROM image, and they've seen to it that it's impossible to
protect. Again, TOTALLY RIDICULOUS.

Do you have any suggestions how to preserve the flashability of the part
through our bootloader while still protecting the chip from code copying and
downloading, etc?

Thank for any insight you can provide, it is truly appreciated, from a coder
in a jam!!!

-----Original Message-----
From: pic microcontroller discussion list
[mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of M. Adam Davis
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 1:50 AM
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: [PIC]: about the flash memory on the 16F877

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