Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Alex Bystrov, Professor David Kinniment, Professor Alex Yakovlev
This report presents asynchronous design solutions to the problem of Priority Arbitration which is defined in the following form. A system consists of multiple, physically concurrent, processes with a shared resource. The discipline of resource allocation is a function of parameters of the active requests, which are assigned to the requests either statically or dynamically. This function can be defined in an (arbitrary) combinatorial way (contrary to conventional, `topological', mappings, such as that used in a daisy-chain arbiter). The proposed designs are truly delay-independent. Furthermore, the priority logic, in the dynamic case, has the following architectural feature: it is a tree structure in which the control flow is maximally decoupled from the data-path by means of an early propagation of the `valid'-`invalid' signals, concurrently with processing the priority data. This leads to significant reduction in the overall arbitration delay when the number of active requests is low.
Author(s): Bystrov A, Kinniment DJ, Yakovlev A
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 1999
Pages: 17
Print publication date: 01/10/1999
Source Publication Date: October 1999
Report Number: 687
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/687.pdf
