1. CONCURRENT MULTIRESOURCE ARBITER DESIGN AND
APPLICATIONS
ABSTRACT:
This paper presents a novel type of asynchronous arbiter that allocates M
interchangeable resources among N clients. This arbiter enables the concurrent utilization of
multiple resources and is a useful device in various load-balancing circuits. Dedicated request
signals from the resources and the clients are used in pairs to form each new grant. The 2 × 2
arbiter is examined as an accessible special case of the N × M arbiter. A concurrent
implementation is compared to fully sequential design. It is shown that the sequential design
can be more practical when the time between a grant and the withdrawal of the initial request
is small. The concurrent design provides higher performance in a system with a longer
resource utilization time. A scalable tiled structure is developed to extend the arbiter structure
beyond 2 × 2 to support N clients and M resources. Models and subsequent implementations
of the tiles are presented. The tiles can be repeated without the use of additional connecting
logic, enabling the construction of arbiters of larger sizes. Several examples demonstrate the
usage of the arbiter