Patent ID: 7739437

Claim:
An access arbiter for arbitrating between access requests from a plurality of requesters to an access target, the access arbiter comprising: priority holding means for holding a priority of access permission to each of the requesters; priority control means operatively coupled to the priority holding means and for controlling the priority held by the priority holding means; and access permitting means operatively coupled to the plurality of requesters and for giving access permission to the requester having the highest priority held by the priority holding means, wherein, when there is an access request from the requester, or when there is no access request and the priority is lower than a predetermined reference priority, the priority control means increases the priority by a predetermined degree of increase in accordance with an elapsed time and, when access is permitted, the priority control means decreases the priority by a predetermined degree of decrease, said predetermined degree of decrease is independent of the priority when access is permitted.