Look-ahead priority arbitration system and method

摘要

An improved arbitration system is disclosed for arbitrating signals at a plurality of input nodes to output nodes where each input node can access any output node. The system includes a FIFO (first-in- first-out) input queue for each node and means for arbitrating the top of each queue for providing the arbitrated output to a given node and means when the top of the input queue has no request for a given node arbitrating the requests from the next to the top entry of the input queues and providing the data from the next to top entry associated with the arbitrated request to the given node.