| 摘要 |
The present invention, generally speaking, provides a system and method of decoupling the address and data buses of a system bus using side band information signals. A computer system with which the invention may be used has a system bus including an address bus and a data bus and has, operatively connected to said system bus, multiple master devices, including a microprocessor, and multiple slave devices. In accordance with one embodiment of the invention, the address bus and the data bus are decoupled by providing, in addition to signals carried by the system bus, first side-band signals including, for each master device besides the microprocessor, an address arbitration signal, and providing, in addition to signals carried by the system bus, second side-band signals including, for each slave device, an address termination signal, a data arbitration signal, and a read-ready signal indicating that a respective slave device has data to present on the system bus. An address arbitration vector is formed, composed of address arbitration signals for the master devices, an address termination vector is formed, composed of address termination signals for the slave devices, and a read-ready vector is formed, composed of read-ready signals for the slave devices. The address arbitration vector and the address termination vector are sampled. Using a queue structure having a front and a rear, pairs of address arbitration and address termination vectors sampled at different sampling times are queued. Given a pair of address arbitration and address termination vectors at the head of the queue structure and a subsequent, corresponding read-ready vector, a data arbitration signal is issued to one of the slave devices and one of the master devices, as a "paired data bus grant. |
