1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an electronic device and, more particularly, an integrated circuit device capable of verifying a program operation of a non-volatile memory.
2. Discussion of Related Art
A smart card is a card embedded with a microprocessor and a memory or with a memory chip without logic. The microprocessor can add, delete, and process information on the card, while the memory chip (e.g., a pre-paid card) can perform only given operations. Unlike a magnetic strip card, the smart card can store functions and information. Therefore, the smart card can access a remote database during processing. Smart cards may be categorized into three types, including an integrated circuit microprocessor card, an integrated circuit memory card, and an optical memory card.
Data (e.g., financial information) stored in the smart card needs high security. For this reason, in a case of programming data needing secure data storage, data written to the smart card needs to be verified. Herein, a program operation may include a write operation, erase and write operations, and an erase operation.
Verification of programmed data stored on the smart card may be carried out through the following stages. Source data is stored in a target region of secure data storage. Stored data is read out from the target region of the secure data storage, and the read data is compared with the source data. The data is verified according to the comparison result. In the comparison, data read from the target region of the secure data storage is compared with the source data in a given unit (e.g., a word unit). The comparison may need a long time to perform the compare operation, which may act as a limit factor to improve an operation performance of the smart card.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds