Round-robin Arbiter Design and Generation

In this paper, we introduce a Roundrobin 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 specified by the user of RAG. 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 4x4 and 2x2 switch arbiters (SAs). Using a .25 TSMC standard cell library from LEDA Systems [11, 15], 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