Patent ID: 7065595

Claim:
A method of managing access to a bus comprising: (a) partitioning a bus access time to said bus into a plurality of bus intervals (BIs); (b) assigning, at the beginning of each of said BIs, an initial programmed Grant Balance Factor value (GBF) for each of a plurality of bus masters (BMs) managing access to said bus, generating a corresponding plurality of GBFs, each of said plurality of GBFs corresponding to a requested bus bandwidth; (c) arbitrating among requesting first BMs within said plurality of BMs, said first BMs having a highest GBF greater than zero during a present BI; (d) granting a bus access to a selected first BM in response to step (c); (e) decrementing by one a GBF of said selected first BM; and (e1) removing said selected first BM from an arbitration queue of said arbitrating step (c) if its GBF is equal to zero during said present BI.