Koninklijke Philips Corporation N.v.

U.S. Philips Corporation

Dieter Hagedorn

Wolfgang Buhr

Detlef Mueller

Jacobus M Bakker

To provide an electric or electronic circuit arrangement as well as a method of detecting and/or identifying and/or recording at least an access violation, particularly at least a memory access violation, in a microcontroller provided particularly for a chip card or smart card, with which the source causing this access violation (referred to as break source) as well as the code address occurring upon this violation can be detected and/or identified and/or recorded when an access violation occurs during the program run, the circuit arrangement comprises at least a memory unit; at least an interface unit assigned to the memory unit; at least a processor unit connected to the memory unit particularly via the interface unit for executing instruction codes. These instruction codes can be requested from the interface unit by means of at least a request unit; are run up in at least a fetch or request queue in the request unit; and are decodable by means of at least a decoding unit assigned to the processor unit for running the fetch or request queue, in which a given category of access violation codes is assignable to each given category of access violations. The access violation code replaces the corresponding instruction code, and comprises data such as information on the address, particularly the code address and/or the type and/or the location and/or the source and/or the instant of the access violation.

Circuit arrangement and method of detecting access violation in a microcontroller

For use by an emulation circuit, a non-special-custom microcontroller multiplexes a port among user data and program store addresses. It has a multistate machine cycle with plural clock pulses per state. Various additionally provided emulation pins allow for outputting to an emulation circuit any or all of the following signals:

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Hamburg, Germany

Dieter Hagedorn