Patent ID: 7165126

Claim:
A direct memory access device, comprising: a designation unit for designating transfer modes, when receiving an instruction to transfer data, to perform byte transfers, in response to a first control signal at a first level, and word transfers, in response to the first control signal at a second level for first data of the data to be transferred and to perform byte transfers, in response to a second control signal at a first level and word transfers, in response to the second control signal at a second level for last data of the data to be transferred and word transfers for all other data between the first and last data of the data to be transferred; and a transfer unit for performing a data transfer by direct memory access from a data transfer source to a data transfer destination by said designated transfer modes, wherein the first control signal is based solely on the physical address of a first data byte and the second control signal is based solely on the physical address of the last data byte of the data to be transferred.