AMBA An Onchip Communication Protocol

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M.KALYAN

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Introduction

Need for higher speed and performance in applications is a driving requirement of any embedded system. Increasing processors clock not a solution and hence System on Chip (SoC) is emerging at such higher pace. But SoC faces a gap between productivity and time to market. Design complexity increases with multicore and other features

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SoC Design

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Necessity of Standard Protocols

Interconnect topologies with multiple address, data, handshaking buses enable high performance and low latency They can no longer be verified with the standard directed testing methodologies. Greater amount of risk and pressures Verification of such new interconnections becomes much more complex.

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Benefits of Such Protocols

To address the gap between production and time to market. To make design verfication/testing simpler To avoid integration mismatches in SoC

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Standard Bus Protocols

AMBA (ARM) CoreConnect (IBM) Sonics Smart Interconnect (Sonics) STBus (STMicroelectronics) Wishbone (Opencores) Avalon (Altera) PI Bus (OMI) MARBLE (Univ. of Manchester) (PalmChip)

CoreFrame 7/3/12

AMBA Protocol

AMBA is an open standard, onchip bus specification by ARM ltd. AMBA enhances a reusable design methodology by defining a common backbone for SoC modules. It is now widely used on a range ofASIC and SoC parts, applications processors used in modern portable mobile devices.

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Objectives of the AMBA specification

The AMBA specification has been derived to satisfy four key requirements:

to be technology-independent and be appropriate for full-custom, standard cell and gate array technologies encourage modular system design to improve processor independence minimize the silicon infrastructure required to support efficient on-chip and off-chip communication

to to

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Typical AMBA System

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AMBA 3 Specifications
AMBA 3defines four buses/interfaces:

Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB) Advanced System Bus (ASB) Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB)

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AMBA AHB Features

AMBA AHB implements the features required for high-performance, high clock frequency systems including: burst transfers split transactions single-cycle bus master handover single-clock edge operation non-tristate implementation wider data bus configurations (64/128 7/3/12 bits).

AHB, general view, multimaster

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AHB, simple transfer

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AHB, wait

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Data bus, little endian,big endian

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Arbitration

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AHB, decoding, example

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Advanced System Bus (ASB)

AMBA ASB is an alternative system bus suitable for use where the highperformance features of AHB are not required. ASB also supports the efficient connection of processors, on-chip memories and off-chip external memory interfaces with low-power peripheral macrocell functions.

Burst transfers, pipelined transfer operation, multiple bus master are 7/3/12some of its features.

Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB)

The AMBA APB is for low-power peripherals. AMBA APB is optimized for minimal power consumption and reduced interface complexity to support peripheral functions. APB can be used in conjunction with either version of the system bus.

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APB transfers

Write transfer
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Read transfer

Advanced eXtensible Interface AXI, the third generation of AMBA

interface targeted at high performance, high clock frequency system designs : separate address/control and data phases support for unaligned data transfers using byte strobes burst based transactions with only start address easy addition of register stages to provide timing closure.

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AXI Features

Out of order completion Multiple outstanding bursts Burst addressing Channel architecture Registers Slices

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Bridging of AMBA 2 & 3 protocols

BRIDGING
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AMBA 2 Vs AMBA 3

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ARM Cores and Their Bus Interfaces

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Conclusion

AMBA is a well supported protocol with

very powerful features to address the needs of next generation designs.

Powerful verification IP, tools like RVM from Synopsys allow designers to reduce the overall design cycle in designing the products using AMBA technology.

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OU KY AN TH
Any Queries?

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References
1.

IHI0011A_AMBA_SPEC.pdf & IHI0022D2c_amba_axi_protocol_spec_bet a from http://arm.com Designing with AMBA AXI by Mic Posner, Synopsis & VCI interface and AMBA bus Design reuse pdfs from http://whereisdoc.com AMBA Bus from http://wikipedia.com

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