Arbitration Modes

The AXI Interconnect core includes arbiter engines that grant the request to an AXI master when more than one AXI master issues a request. The AXI Interconnect supports three types of arbitration modes.

Fixed Priority

In this mode, the arbiter always prioritizes the most significant bit (MSB) ports as indicated by the bits shown in bold in the following example. Lower priority ports suffer from starvation.

Request 11100000 11100000 11100000 1110010 00001011 00000000 00001111 11111111
Grant 10000000 10000000 10000000 10000000 00001000 00000000 00001000 10000000

Round Robin 1

The arbitration starts from the MSB port. When more than two transaction requests are issued at the same time, the arbiter grants the request to the port sitting on the right-hand side nearest to the previously served port.

Example:

Request 11100000 11100000 11100000 1110010 00001011 00000000 00001111 11111111
Grant 10000000 01000000 00100000 00000010 00000001 00000000 00001000 00000100

Round Robin 2

The arbitration starts from the MSB port. The arbitration goes through all connected master ports sequentially with a counter. When there is no request from the assigned master, the arbiter grants the port sitting on the right-hand side nearest to the assigned port. There are no counter increments when there are no requests.

Example:

Request 11100000 11100000 11100000 1110010 00001011 00000000 00001111 11111111
Counter 7 6 5 4 3 3 2 1
Grant 10000000 01000000 00100000 00000010 00001000 00000000 00000100 00000010