Electronic device and control method thereof

Abstract

An electronic device includes: a control unit having an interface unit for performing communication with an external host device and a state register group; and a plurality of function units for performing communication with the host device via the interface unit. The state register group has a plurality of state registers which are correlated to the function units, respectively, and indicate whether the corresponding function unit is operable and whether the corresponding unit is performing processing. When the control unit receives an instruction from the host device, the control unit transfers the instruction to a function unit if the instruction is for any of the function units, and transmits a state of the state register group as a response to the host device if the instruction is a read instruction of the state register group.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention relates to an electronic device and a control method thereof. Background technique [0002] In recent years, IC cards with storage media such as flash memory (flash memory) have attracted attention as storage devices for portable information devices (eg, portable personal computers, digital cameras, PDAs) that process large amounts of data such as music or video data. And recently, the IC card not only plays the role of a bridge / medium (bridge media) as a memory for data accumulation and data exchange between machines, but also plays a role of a so-called function expansion device of the machine (for example, refer to Non-Patent Document 1). Therefore, an IC card with multiple functional units is called a multi-function IC card. [0003] First, refer to Figure 15 The structure of the prior art multifunctional IC card disclosed in the publication is explained. Figure 15 It is a block diagram showing the structure of a conventional mult...

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Problems solved by technology

[0024] However, the specified time for judging as a timeout is longer than the normal communication time

According to the previous method, in the case that one or more functional units cannot work, it takes a long time before the master device knows whether all the functional units can work

Or the response is not returned, it may be caused by other reasons besides the failure of the functional unit to work

In previous electronic devices, it is difficult for the main device to correctly know whether each functional unit is working

In conventional electronic devices, all functional units are activated, but there are also functional units that are not used by the user, and activation of even functional units that are not used is a major cause of wasteful power consumption.

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