Inherent and Literal Addressing

Many PIC18 control instructions do not need any argument at all; they either perform an operation that globally affects the device or they operate implicitly on one register. This addressing mode is known as Inherent Addressing. Examples include SLEEP, RESET and DAW.

Other instructions work in a similar way but require an additional explicit argument in the opcode. This is known as Literal Addressing mode because they require some literal value as an argument. Examples include ADDLW and MOVLW, which respectively, add or move a literal value to the W register. Other examples include CALL and GOTO, which include a 20-bit program memory address.