Patent 7849246 was granted and assigned to Panasonic on December, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An I2C bus control circuit includes a continuous transmission control section in addition to a transmission control section, a sequence control section, a data line control section, and a clock line control section. The continuous transmission control section has a number-of-continuous transmission bytes register and first to (n−1)th continuous transmission data registers, and supplies an interrupt signal to the controller when continuous transmission is completed or an error is detected. The number of times the controller conducts interrupt processing is thus reduced and the processing time is reduced.