Unit for arbitration of access to a bus of a multiprocessor system with

Abstract

In a multiprocessor system with shared resources, which several processors access via a system bus by presenting bus access requests to an arbitration unit and receiving from the latter access grant signals and in which the busy state of a resource or a conflict of consistency determine the generation of a RETRY signal and compel the processor, which has obtained access to the bus, to execute an access RETRY attempt, consecutive repeated access RETRY attempts of the same processor activate logic of the arbitration unit which temporarily mask, for a varying duration, the access requests of the same processor for the execution of further consecutive RETRY attempts, the varying duration first increasing as a function of the number of further RETRY attempts and then varying in a random manner.