The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 07, 2002
Filed:
Sep. 19, 1996
Eino Jacobs, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Tzungren Tzeng, San Jose, CA (US);
Trimedia Technologies, Inc., Milpitas, CA (US);
Abstract
A method and apparatus for bus arbitration wherein each bus agent is assigned a weight that governs the percentage of bandwidth allocated to the agent. In addition, each bus agent may also raise the priority of its request based on the amount of time that agent's request has not been serviced. Specifically, the waiting period for the agent is selected so that the agent would be guaranteed access to the bus such that a worst case latency constraint is satisfied. Finally, the arbitration scheme of the present invention can be split into multiple levels of hierarchy, such that when an agent wins arbitration at one level, it is passed to the next higher level where it competes with other agents for bus access.