Proceedings of the 15th international symposium on System Synthesis (ISSS '02)
Round-Robin Arbiter Design and Generation
Kyoto, Japan
October 02-October 04
ISBN: 1-58113-576-9
In this paper, we introduce a Round-robin Arbiter Generator (RAG) tool. The RAG tool can generate a design for a Bus Arbiter (BA). The BA is able to handle the exact number of bus masters for both on-chip and off-chip buses. RAG can also generate a distributed and parallel hierarchical Switch Arbiter (SA). The first contribution of this paper is the automated generation of a round-robin token passing BA to reduce time spent on arbiter design. The generated arbiter is fair, fast, and has a low and predictable worst-case wait time. The second contribution of this paper is the design and integration of a distributed fast arbiter, e.g., for a terabit switch, based on 2x2 and 4x4 switch arbiters (SAs). Using a .25? TSMC standard cell library from LEDA Systems [10, 14], we show the arbitration time of a 256x256 SA for a terabit switch and demonstrate that the SA generated by RAG meets the time constraint to achieve approximately six terabits of throughput in a typical network switch design. Furthermore, our generated SA performs better than the Ping-Pong Arbiter and Programmable Priority Encoder by a factor of 1.9X and 2.4X, respectively.
Index Terms:
arbiter, distributed arbiter, round-robin token passing, synthesis, terabit switch
Citation:
Vincent J. Mooney, George F. Riley, Eung S. Shin, "Round-Robin Arbiter Design and Generation," isss, pp.243-248, Proceedings of the 15th international symposium on System Synthesis (ISSS '02), 2002