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:
Feb. 11, 2003
Filed:
Oct. 05, 1999
Michael Joseph Azevedo, San Jose, CA (US);
Carol Spanel, San Jose, CA (US);
Andrew Dale Walls, San Jose, CA (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A shared bus arbitration scheme for a data communication system is provided, where a shared bus is connected to a plurality of bus masters and resources, some resources having higher priority than the others and including a peripheral device. Each master may request control of the shared bus and is adapted to perform short transfers and long burst transfers on the shared bus between a resource and the master. A shared bus arbiter is utilized for dynamically determining the highest priority request between a number of shared bus requests, and granting control of the shared bus to the highest priority requesting bus master. The arbiter utilizes a three-level priority hierarchy arbitration scheme where the highest priority level is given to short message transfer requests on the higher-priority system resources, the intermediate priority level is given to short message transfer requests on the lower-priority system resources, if there are no outstanding higher priority level requests, and the lowest priority level is given for long burst transfers, if there are no outstanding short message transfer requests.