Arbiter having programmable arbitration points for undefined length burst accesses and method

[0014] Generally, the present invention provides an arbiter in a data processing system that uses burst information transfers of unknown length wherein the points in time when arbitration is permitted is programmable by a user. The user may select how many access beats will be transmitted between a master device and a slave device before allowing access to the slave device to be arbitrated, or may select a number of system clock cycles which should occur before allowing arbitration for the slave device. Once a programmed point in time is reached, any type of arbitration protocol may be used to determine whether access to the slave device will be changed to another master device. As taught herein, the effectiveness of the burst access is efficiently utilized by permitting a programmable number of low latency accesses to be made after a higher overhead initiation operation for a burst is performed.

[0015] As used herein, the terms “variable length bursts”, “unlimited bursts”, “unknown bu