Priority Arbiters

摘要

This report presents asynchronous design solutions to the problem of PriorityArbitration 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 statistically 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.