MPLAB is the development environment produced by Arizona Microchip. It provides an editor, an assembler and an emulation system which lets you create and debug PIC assembler programs. It also links directly with development hardware into which you can download the programs that you write.

We are just going to use the assembler component of MPLAB. The C2C compiler will act on our C program file to produce a file containing assembler which MPLAB then converts into bytes to be loaded into the PIC. This is all done automatically when you compile the program.

Note that this means that if you do not want to use the PICmicro development board to run your C programs you can simply use MPLAB on the assembler file the compiler produces and then send the programs to your target system. You can also use the MPLAB simulator to simulate the execution of PIC assembler programs, although how to do this is beyond the scope of the course.