Patent ID: 7099922

Claim:
A method for simultaneous communication over a closed loop bus to permit at least two master agents and slave agent on the bus to communicate, the method comprising: coupling at least one slave agent with at least two master agents including a first master agent and a second master agent on a closed loop bus in a ring network for simultaneous communications, wherein the simultaneous communications on the bus permits two or more of the master agents and the slave agent on the bus to communicate at one time independent of a clock signal; determining if there is data from at least one of the master agents, and if there is data from the at least one of the master agents then performing: testing if the data from the closed loop bus is a token, wherein the token is used for complete roundtrip communication transactions so as to avoid deadlock on the closed loop bus; in response to the data from the closed loop bus being a token, then moving the data from the at least one of the master agents to the closed loop bus and discarding the token from the closed loop bus; and in response to the data not being a token from the closed loop bus, then moving the data from the input of the closed loop bus to the output of the closed loop bus; wherein in response to the data not being from the at least one of the master agents and the data is from the closed loop bus, then moving the data from the input of the closed loop bus to the output of the closed loop bus.