20.3.3.3 Preventing Unintentional Changes
The WDT provides two security mechanisms to avoid unintentional changes to the WDT settings:
- The CCP mechanism, employing a timed write procedure for changing the WDT control registers. Refer to Configuration Change Protection section for further details.
- Locking the configuration by writing a
‘
1
’ to the Lock (LOCK) bit in the Status (STATUS) register. When this bit is ‘1
’, the Control A (CTRLA) register cannot be changed. The LOCK bit can only be written to ‘1
’ in software, while the device needs to be in Debug mode to write it to ‘0
’. Consequently, the software cannot disable the WDT.
Note: The WDT configuration is loaded from
fuses after Reset. If the PERIOD bit field is set to a non-zero value, the LOCK bit is
automatically set in the STATUS register.