Patent ID: 8041869

Claim:
A method of bus arbitration comprising the acts of: providing a system having a plurality of data handling units and a shared bus with a plurality of data-lines, there being sufficient number of data-lines to allow multiple data handling units to simultaneously access different data-lines of the shared bus during a single bus cycle, and there being more data units than a minimum number of data units that could simultaneously access all the data-lines of the shared buss in a single cycle, receiving data transfer requests from the data handling units; selecting one or more first sets of one or more data transfer requests, which first sets each serves a same maximum number of data handling units in a single bus cycle, and selecting from the one or more first sets, a single second set which utilizes a maximum number of data-lines in the single bus cycle, and allowing the data handling units that issued said selected second set of data transfer requests to access said bus in a single bus cycle.