On-Chip Communication Architectures

374 CHAPTER 10 Verifi cation and Security Issues

between the masters and the arbiter. However, this is impractical in most cases

as it requires extra computation and hardware. An alternative method is to moni-

tor the bus traffi c to obtain the master and slave states. The arbiter may use the

HTRANS signal to check whether the master is idle or transmitting (NONSEQ,

SEQ), the HBURST signal to predict the remaining cycles from the transfer, and

the HRESP signal to monitor whether the active master and slave has to step back

to repeat a transaction. Now consider the case where the slave has previously

SPLIT master1 ( master1 is masked by the arbiter), ...