Generalised Asynchronous Arbiter

The paper presents the design of a generalised asynchronous arbiter with a two-stage architecture that efficiently handles requests from multiple concurrent channels. The first stage of the arbiter monitors the incoming requests and locks their state as soon as one or more requests are detected. The second stage performs arbitration based on the locked state of the requests and produces the corresponding grant signals. The separation of the two stages is crucial for reducing the complexity of the arbitration logic, which allows us to obtain practical implementations for complex arbitration protocols. Several application examples of the generalised arbiter are proposed and evaluated in terms of scalability with respect to the growing number of request channels. The presented designs are verified to have no hazards or deadlocks using methods based on circuit Petri nets.