A precise bandwidth control arbitration algorithm for hard real-time SoC buses

Abstract

On an SoC bus, contentions occur while different IP cores request the bus access at the same time. Hence an arbiter is mandatory to deal with the contention issue on a shared bus system. In different applications, IPs may have real-time and/or bandwidth requirements. It is very difficult to design an arbitration algorithm to simultaneously meet these two requirements. In this paper, we propose an innovative arbitration algorithm, RB-lottery, to meet both of the requirements. It can provide not only the hard real-time guarantee but also the precise bandwidth controllability. The experimental results show that RB-lottery outperforms several well-known existing arbitration algorithms.