ARBITRATION DEVICE FOR LATCHING ONLY THE HIGHEST PRIORITY REQUEST WHEN THE COMMON RESOURCE IS BUSY

An arbitration device for enabling a common resource to be shared by a plurality of processors, all connected by a common bus and each processor having a certain access priority. When more than one processor requests access to the resource, the highest priority processor request signal is latched and access is granted while the other requesting processor's latches remain set (access not granted). If two processors request access while the resource is busy, then only the latch of the processor having the highest priority of the two will be reset when the bus becomes available, and that processor will gain access.