Abstract: A device for communication with a terminal. The device comprises: a communication unit for communicating with the terminal; a biometric unit comprising a biometric sensor for sensing biometric data; contacts for connecting the device to the terminal; a first physical interface between the biometric unit and the contacts configured to enable contact communication between the biometric unit and the terminal; and a second physical interface between the communication unit and the biometric unit configured to enable contact communication between the communication unit and the biometric unit. The device is configured such that all contact communications between the terminal and the communication unit are routed through the biometric unit via the first and second physical interfaces.

Abstract: A two-wire interface (300) for connecting a first device (106) and a second device (108). The two-wire interface (300) is operable in a handshaking mode and a data transfer mode. In the handshaking mode the first wire (302) of the interface (300) is driven by the first device (106) and the second wire (304) of the interface (300) is driven by the second device (108) so that the first (106) and second (108) devices can perform a handshaking sequence. In the data transfer mode one of the first wire (302) and the second wire (304) is driven by one of the first (106) and second (108) devices to provide a clock signal, and the other wire is driven by either the first device (106) or the second device (108) depending which device is transmitting data. Accordingly, the two-wire interfaces (300) are operable in two modes (e.g. handshaking mode and data transfer mode) and one of the wires (302, 304) of the interface (300) may be driven by a different device in the two modes.

Abstract: A device for communication with a terminal. The device comprises: a communication unit for communicating with the terminal; a biometric unit comprising a biometric sensor for sensing biometric data; contacts for connecting the device to the terminal; a first physical interface between the biometric unit and the contacts configured to enable contact communication between the biometric unit and the terminal; and a second physical interface between the communication unit and the biometric unit configured to enable contact communication between the communication unit and the biometric unit. The device is configured such that all contact communications between the terminal and the communication unit are routed through the biometric unit via the first and second physical interfaces.

Abstract: A method for protecting data between a circuit and a memory is disclosed. The method generally includes the steps of (A) generating a particular address among a plurality of addresses for accessing a particular area among a plurality of areas in the memory, (B) determining a particular key among a plurality of keys associated with the particular area, (C) generating a cipher stream from both the particular address and the particular key and (D) modifying a data item with the cipher stream such that the data item is encrypted during a transfer between the circuit and the memory.

Abstract: In order to reduce memory bandwidth when predicting B-frames from stored anchor frames in an MPEG-2 video decoder, memory access requests (20) to external memory (14) storing anchor frames are selectively suppressed (18) so that only data is accessed which is required for the current data to be displayed. To still further reduce memory bandwidth, a prediction type (frame picture-frame prediction-half pel filtering) which requires a large number of memory requests is approximated to a type (field prediction) which requires half as many memory requests.