Appeal No. 2002-1135
Application 09/416,497
BACKGROUND
The invention relates to a system and method for performing
early arbitration on a full duplex bus in order to permit
resolution of requests for a next fairness interval during a
current fairness interval such that the grant of the highest
priority request in the next fairness interval may immediately
follow a last packet of a last subaction in a current fairness
interval. A fairness interval is a period of time during which a
node may transmit a limited number of asynchronous packets.
Thus, the bandwidth previously lost by propagating an arbitration
reset token and waiting for arbitration requests during an
arbitration reset gap can be substantially eliminated.
Claim 1 is reproduced below.2
1. An apparatus comprising:
a state machine that generates a best arbitration
request for a current fairness interval or a next fairness
interval, wherein the request is encoded with a priority
that identifies to which of the current fairness interval
and the next fairness interval the requests corresponds;
a transceiver coupled to the state machine; and
a port coupled to the transceiver.
2 It is not clear what is meant by " a best arbitration
request" in claims 1 and 17 and in the specification, page 4,
line 4.
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