Size of the HEX file

Carlos Junior · Joined: 08 Dec 2006 Posts: 2

Could, please, anyone help me ?

I am seeing an strange thing about the HEX file generated by the CCS compiler at the folder of the project in my Windows Explorer .

I am using an 8K Flash Program PIC, teh CCS (PCWH Compiler, IDE version 3.43) integrated with MPLAB IDE 7.40 .

The strange thing is about the size of the HEX file. It has 18.6KBytes, while the Flash Program Memory of the PIC has 8KWords (Word=14bits, converting to Bytes would be : 14KBytes of ROM ) . I program the PIC and it works (the program runs inside it) ... Is not that strange ? Why the HEX file is bigger than the ROM size ? Should it not have error of exceeded ROM ?

Thanks...
_________________
Carlos Junior
([email protected])
Electrical Engineer
Location: Brasil

Sherpa Doug · Guest

The .hex file has two ascii characters representing each byte of ROM content, plus some header information. Therefore the .hex file will always be a little more than twice the size of the ROM bytes actually used.