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US 2008/0288689 A1Published application
Opportunistic granting arbitration scheme for fixed priority grant counter based arbiter
OwnerBrian Hoang, Khee Wooi Leeinventors
Life of this patent
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Abstract
In one embodiment, an arbiter may provide for opportunistic granting of one or more grants to a requestor that has no available fixed grants remaining in a given arbitration round. In one embodiment, a method may detect that a target resource to be accessed by a requestor with a valid grant count is unavailable during an arbitration round, and opportunistically grant an access grant to another requestor to access a different target resource for a slot of the round. Other embodiments are described and claimed.
Claims13
An apparatus comprising:
- a first arbiter to grant requests from a plurality of requesters according to a fixed priority protocol in which each of the plurality of requesters is granted a predetermined number of fixed grants per arbitration cycle;
- and
- a second arbiter coupled to the first arbiter to grant an opportunistic grant to one of the plurality of requestors in a slot of the arbitration cycle according to an opportunistic grant mechanism if the first arbiter cannot grant a fixed grant to one of the plurality of requestors having a valid number of fixed grants at a time of the slot of the arbitration cycle.
A method comprising:
- receiving requests from a plurality of requesters in an arbiter that is to provide access to a plurality of target resources;
- detecting that a first target resource to be accessed by a first requestor of the plurality of requestors having a valid grant count is unavailable during a slot of an arbitration round associated with the first requestor;
- and
- opportunistically granting an access grant to a second requester of the plurality of requesters to access a second target resource for the slot of the arbitration round, wherein the second requester does not have a valid grant count.
1 more element
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.