A tree arbiter cell for high speed resource sharing in asynchronous environments

Abstract

We present a novel tree arbiter cell that allows a pipelined processing of asynchronous requests. In this way it can achieve significantly lower delay in the critical case of frequent requests coming from different clients. We elaborate the necessary extension to facilitate a cascaded use of this cell in a tree-like fashion, and we show by theoretical analysis that in this configuration our cell provides better fairness than the standard approach. We implement our approach and quantitatively compare its performance properties with related work in a gatelevel simulation. In our sample asynchronous Networks-on-Chip application our new cell proves to increase the throughput of three different designs available in literature by approximately 61.28%, 69.24%, and 186.85% respectively.