Purpose This work focused on a basic building block of an allocation unit that carries out the critical job of deciding between the conflicting requests, i.e. an arbiter unit. The purpose of this work is to implement an improved hybrid arbiter while harnessing the basic advantages of a matrix arbiter. Design/methodology/approach The basic approach of the design methodology involves the extraction of traffic information from buffer signals of each port. As the traffic arrives in the buffer of respective ports, information from these buffers acts as a source of differentiation between the ports receiving low traffic rates and ports receiving high traffic rates. A logic circuit is devised that enables an arbiter to dynamically assign priorities to different ports based on the information from buffers. For implementation and verification of the proposed design, a two-stage approach was used. Stage I comprises comparing the proposed arbiter with other arbiters in the literature using Vivado integrated design environment platform. Stage II demonstrates the implementation of the proposed design in Cadence design environment for application-specific integrated chip level implementation. By using such a strategy, this study aims to have a special focus on the feasibility of the design for very large-scale integration implementation. Findings According to the simulation results, the proposed hybrid arbiter maintains the advantage of a basic matrix arbiter and also possesses the additional feature of fault-tolerant traffic awareness. These features for a hybrid arbiter are achieved with a 19% increase in throughput, a 1.5% decrease in delay and a 19% area increase in comparison to a conventional matrix arbiter. Originality/value This paper proposes a traffic-aware mechanism that increases the throughput of an arbiter unit with some area trade-off. The key feature of this hybrid arbiter is that it can assign priorities to the requesting ports based upon the real-time traffic requirements of each port. As a result of this, the arbiter is dynamically able to make arbitration decisions. Now because buffer information is valuable in winning the priority, the presence of a fault-tolerant policy ensures that none of the priority is assigned falsely to a requesting port. By this, wastage of arbitration cycles is avoided and an increase in throughput is also achieved.

The tendency towards multiple prescribing, together with an increased awareness of the toxicity of drugs, has made the rapid identification of potentially dangerous drug interactions of paramount importance.We have developed a drug interaction identification system based on a Commodore 4032 microcomputer and disk drive, suitable for use by both hospital and retail pharmacists.The database contains entries relating to previously reported interactions (e.g. acetohexamide-phenylbutazone), together with a multicharacter code which is used to generate specific messages concerning the interaction. Two message groups are used, each being selected independently by the code stored in the database.In the first group are messages referring to the interaction, ranging from "hazardous potentiation" to "hazardous inhibition". The second group of messages contain nineteen qualifying statements which attempt to further briefly describe the cause of the interaction.The database currently contains information on 155 generic drugs.The program may be operated in three different modes:-1. A direct search for an interaction between two generic drugs, or between a generic drug and a specific dietary factor. This mode returns a hard copy of the relevant interaction messages. If no interaction is on file, this fact is reported.2. This mode is of more use to those requiring further information concerning the interaction. In addition to the interaction report, the output also prints a reference to the original paper reporting the interaction.3. Mode 3 operation allows for the possibility of an interaction between a new drug and a patient's current medication. Patient details are stored on a "patient file".When the new prescription is entered, the patient's current medication is compared with the new drug and any interactions presented.Use of the interaction retrieval system described makes the recall of drug-drug and drug-diet interactions very rapid, and we believe that the system described could form the basis of a pharmacy-based interaction monitoring system.