A Transfer-Time Accurate Prediction Based Arbitration Algorithm for On-Chip Buses

In system-on-a-chip,different IP (intellectual property) cores have different real-time and bandwidth requirements.Arbiters are adopted to solve bus contentions with various kinds of arbitration algorithms.It is difficult to design an arbitration algorithm to meet both requirements.In this paper,we present a transfer time accurate prediction based arbitration algorithm(TAP),which can precisely predict the finish time for each transfer.With this algorithm,the arbiter knows which master's real-time requirement would be violated and changes the arbitration scheme in time to avoid a potential real-time violation.At the same time,the arbiter compares each master's real transferred bandwidth with its configured bandwidth and gets useful information for arbitration to provide precise bandwidth allocation.The experimental results show that TAP outperforms five well-known existing arbitration algorithms on real-time requirement with the average improvement of 66.47%.