• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
• /
• v.34 no.5_6
• /
• pp.257-266
• /
• 2007

In On-Chip bus, the arbitration scheme is one of the critical factors that decide the overall system performance. The arbitration scheme used in traditional shared bus is the master-side arbitration based on the request and grant signals between multiple masters and single arbiter. In the case of the master-side arbitration, only one master and one slave can transfer the data at a time. Therefore the throughput of total bus system and the utilization of resources are decreased in the master-side arbitration. However in the slave-side arbitration, there is an arbiter at each slave port and the master just starts a transaction and waits for the slave response to proceed to the next transfer. Thus, the unit of arbitration can be a transaction or a transfer. Besides the throughput of total bus system and the utilization of resources are increased since the multiple masters can simultaneously perform transfers with independent slaves. In this paper, we implement and analyze the arbitration schemes for the Multi-Layer AHB BusMatrix based on the slave-side arbitration. We implement the slave-side arbitration schemes based on fixed priority, round robin and dynamic priority and accomplish the performance simulation to compare and analyze the performance of each arbitration scheme according to the characteristics of the master and slave. With the performance simulation, we observed that when there are few masters on critical path in a bus system, the arbitration scheme based on dynamic priority shows the maximum performance and in other cases, the arbitration scheme based on round robin shows the highest performance. In addition, the arbitration scheme with transaction based multiplexing shows higher performance than the same arbitration scheme with single transfer based switching in an application with frequent accesses to the long latency devices or memories such as SDRAM. The improvements of the arbitration scheme with transaction based multiplexing are 26%, 42% and 51%, respectively when the latency times of SDRAM are 1, 2 and 3 clock cycles.