摘要 |
<p>A bus protocol is provided for pipelined and/or split transaction buses (18,48) which have in-order data bus termination and which do not require data bus arbitration. The present invention solves the problem of matching the initial address request by a bus master (12, 13, 42) to the corresponding data response from a bus slave (14, 15, 44) when the bus (18, 48) used for master-slave communication is a split-transaction bus and/or a pipelined bus. Each bus master (12, 13, 42) and each bus slave (14, 15, 44) has a counter (30-33, 75-76) which is used to store a current pipe depth value (21, 51) from a central pipe counter (16, 72). A transaction start signal (20, 50) and a transaction end signal (22, 52) are used to selectively increment and decrement the counters (30-33, 75-76). <IMAGE></p> |