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Circuits/Building Larger Circuits

Parameterized Fixed-Priority Arbiter

medium
arbiterpriorityparameterizedcombinational

Build a combinational, parameterized priority arbiter for N requesters (default N = 4). Each cycle, at most one grant bit is asserted, chosen by fixed priority: request line 0 has the highest priority, request line N-1 has the lowest.

Interface

Signal Direction Width Description
req input N One request bit per requester
grant output N One-hot grant, or all-zero if no requester is asking

Behavior

  • If req == 0, grant == 0.
  • Otherwise, grant is one-hot, with the single 1 at the position of the lowest-indexed set bit of req.

Examples (N = 4)

req grant
0000 0000
0001 0001
0110 0010
1010 0010
1111 0001

This is a fixed-priority arbiter, not round-robin: requester 0 always wins whenever it asks, regardless of grant history.