s. What are the basic functions of a PIC24 or PIC32 Program Executive (PE)?

The purpose of a program executive code is to transfer massive blocks of data between PC and PIC microcontroller during programming using JTAG protocol. PIC24 and PIC32 memory address spaces (16 MB and 4 GB) are many times larger than the all their available RAM and flash RAMs combined. All the functional units’ registers are also located in these vast address spaces.

Therefore, it suffices to implement three functions, which can be described by the following two pseudo operations in C programming language: int32 Read_Memory_Block(int32 address, int32 block_length), int32 Write_Memory_Block(ARRAY_OF_32BIT_WORDS, int32 address, int32 block_length). You may opt to split Write_Memory_Block operation into two operations Write_RAM_Block and Write_flashRAM_Block. The first function transfers data to PIC RAM and the next one programs it to nonvolatile flash RAM. Microchip PE has many additional functions, but most are useless, because they don’t contribute to fast PIC programming, but rather slow down it with overhead data.