SREC (file format)

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Motorola S-records (SREC) are a form of simple ASCII encoding for binary data. This format is commonly used for firmware uploads to GPSes, industrial robots, and other kinds of microcontroller-driven hardware. It has several convenient properties, including inspectability, easy editing with any text editor, and checksumming for verification of transmission across noisy serial lines.

It consists in a series of hexadecimal data lines, following this structure:

1. Start code, one character, an ASCII letter 'S'.
2. Record type, one digit, 0 to 9, defining the type of the data field.
3. Byte count, two hex digits, a number of bytes (hex digit pairs) in the data and checksum fields.
4. Address, four, six or eight hex digits, the memory position for the data. This address is big endian.
5. Data, a sequence of n bytes of the data themselves. 2n hex digits.
6. Checksum, two hex digits - the least significant byte sum of the values of all fields, inverted.

It is used (among others) by Altera tools to describe executable binary code for embedded processors.

A similar encoding, with slightly different ASCII formatting, termed Intel_HEX is used with Intel processors.

[edit] External links

• Linux manual page for srec format