Patent ID: 7765095

Claim:
An in-circuit emulation system, comprising: a microcontroller, wherein said microcontroller sends I/O read data to a virtual microcontroller, and wherein said I/O read data is processed by an instruction in the virtual microcontroller, said instruction is followed by a conditional jump instruction that resides on said virtual microcontroller; said virtual microcontroller coupled to the microcontroller, wherein said virtual microcontroller has means for detecting said I/O read data, and further has means for computing a speculative conditional jump address before a condition for said conditional jump instruction is satisfied after receipt of said I/O read data; and the virtual microcontroller further having means for determining after receipt of the I/O read data from the microcontroller whether to proceed with instruction execution at a next consecutive address or at the speculative conditional jump address, wherein said virtual microcontroller executes instructions at said next consecutive address or at said speculative conditional jump address based on said means for determining such that said microcontroller and said virtual microcontroller remain in lockstep by executing the same instruction using the same clocking signal.