Cyclone Universal & Cyclone Universal FX - User Manual 56
11 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.
P&E 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.
11.1 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 locate the file.
A utility called SERIALIZE has been developed to make it easy to create, visualize, edit, and
maintain these serial number files.
11.2 Serialize Utility
This section is a modified excerpt from P&E’s Serialize Help File and explains the Serialize utility in
detail.
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