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US 6,675,246 B1Granted
Sharing arbiter
AssigneeSun Microsystems, Inc.
InventorsCharles E. Molnar, Ian W. Jones, Ivan E. Sutherland
Life of this patent
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AssigneeSun Microsystems, Inc.
InventorsCharles E. Molnar, Ian W. Jones, Ivan E. Sutherland
Estimating the term…
The Sharing arbiter is an arbiter which, under certain conditions, permits two or more Done signals to be received before the Sharing arbiter issues a grant signal and, under certain conditions, is permitted to issue more than one grant signal before receiving a Done signal. A Sharing arbiter can be implemented by adding a queue onto the Done input of a Sequencer arbiter. In a Sharing arbiter with a Sharing-number of N and K request inputs, the Sharing arbiter is permitted to issue M grant signals concurrently if M input requests have been received (where M≦K and M≦N) without enforcing mutual exclusion between the grants if at least M Done signals have also been received. Where less than M Done signals have been received (P Done signals, for example), the Sharing arbiter arbitrates among the M input requests and is permitted to issue P grant signals concurrently.
An arbiter having a plurality of request inputs and a plurality of grant outputs, wherein each request input is paired with a grant output such that a grant signal is output at the paired grant output when a request signal is received at the paired request input and the arbiter selects that pair over other pairs for which request signals may have been received, the arbiter comprising:
A method of arbitrating among a plurality of requests in an arbiter which receives request signals on request lines which are part of a plurality of request line/grant line pairs and grants a request received on a request line by issuing a grant signal on the request line's paired grant line, the method comprising the steps of:
An arbiter having a plurality of request inputs and a plurality of grant outputs, wherein each request input is paired with a grant output such that a grant signal is output at the paired grant output when a request signal is received at the paired request input and the arbiter selects that pair over other pairs for which request signals may have been received, the arbiter comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.