A real-time and bandwidth guaranteed arbitration algorithm for SoC bus communication

In shared SoC bus systems, arbiters are usually adopted to solve bus contentions with various kinds of arbitration algorithms. We propose an arbitration algorithm, RT/spl I.bar/lottery, which is designed to meet both hard real-time and bandwidth requirements. For fast evaluation and exploration, we use high abstract-level models in our system simulation environment to generate parameters for our configurable arbiter. The experimental results show that RT/spl I.bar/lottery can meet all hard real-time requirements and perform very well in bandwidth allocation. The results also show that RT/spl I.bar/lottery outperforms several commonly-used arbitration algorithms today.