AMBA
The Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) is a freely available, open standard to connect and manage functional blocks in a system-on-chip (SoC). It facilitates the right-first-time development of multiprocessor designs, with large numbers of controllers and peripherals.
AMBA specifications are royalty free and platform independent, and can be used with any processor architecture. Due to its widespread adoption, AMBA has a robust ecosystem of partners that ensures compatibility and scalability between IP components from different design teams and vendors.
For nearly three decades, AMBA has been a foundational open standard, and has been shipped in billions of devices.
Key Features and Benefits
IP reuse requires a common standard while supporting a wide variety of SoCs with different power, performance, and area requirements. AMBA interfaces scale from simple, low-cost peripheral programming ports to fully coherent, high-bandwidth ports, spanning multiple interconnects and chip-to-chip interfacing.
As an open standard specification, it helps ensure compatibility between IP components from different suppliers. Wide compatibility enables low-friction integration and design reuse, helping to reduce cost of ownership and to accelerate time-to-market. Compatible IP products vary from memory controllers, interconnects, trace solutions, GPUs, CPUs, peripherals, and many others.
AMBA is accepted as the standard for on-chip communication and is widely adopted across the industry. It has a long heritage of dependability and trust, and is used extensively in standards-based IP worldwide.
The wide adoption of AMBA throughout the semiconductor industry has driven a comprehensive market in third-party IP products and tools to support the development of AMBA-based systems.
Learn the Architecture
The Learn the Architecture guides are free tutorials and how-to guides, designed to help hardware and software developers at all levels understand and use Arm technology. We have three guides available for AMBA, providing examples and allowing you to test your knowledge as you go.
AMBA 5
AMBA 5 is the latest generation of freely available AMBA protocol specifications. It introduces the Coherent Hub Interface (CHI) architecture, which defines the interfaces to connect fully coherent processors and high-performance interconnects. AMBA 5 also introduces the AXI5, ACE5 and AHB5 protocols, which extend prior generations to include a number of performances and scalability features, and to align and complement CHI.
Support for Chiplets: Expanding AMBA for Off-Chip Communication
A chiplet is a silicon die that implements part of a system, designed to be combined to create larger and more complex systems that can be packaged and sold as a single component. This means you can assemble a silicon solution from several smaller dies, instead of one single larger monolithic die. The opportunity here is clear, but it also presents a new challenge for designers who will need to navigate interfaces which are not yet standardized, and many non-differentiating choices in chiplet partitioning.
AMBA has been enabling on-chip communication for nearly three decades, and we are pleased to be evolving AMBA with extensions for connecting chiplet-to-chiplet, initially starting with AMBA CHI.