![]() ![]() ![]() Following diagram illustrates this evolution of protocols along with the SOC design trends in industry.įollowing diagram illustrates how an AXI interconnect can be used to build an SOC with various functional blocks talking through a master-slave protocol. Further in 2010, an enhanced version was introduced - AXI 4. With increasing number of functional blocks (IP) integrating into SOC designs, the shared bus protocols (AHB/ASB) started hitting limitations sooner and in 2003, the new revision of AMBA 3 introduced a point to point connectivity protocol - AXI (Advanced Extensible Interface). ![]() ![]() The first step in learning AMBA protocols is to understand where exactly these different protocols are used, how these evolved and how all of them fit into a SOC design.Following diagram (reference from the AMBA 2.0 spec) illustrates a traditional AMBA based SOC design that uses the AHB (Advanced High performance) or ASB (Advanced System Bus) protocols for high bandwidth interconnect and an APB (Advanced Peripheral Bus) protocol for low bandwidth peripheral interconnects. The primary motivation of AMBA protocols is to have a standard and efficient way to interconnecting these blocks with re-use across multiple designs. These designs typically have one or more micro controllers or microprocessors along with several other components - internal memory or external memory bridge, DSP, DMA, accelerators and various other peripherals like USB, UART, PCIE, I2C etc - all integrated on a single chip. The Advanced Micro controller Bus Architecture ( AMBA) bus protocols is a set of interconnect specifications from ARM that standardizes on chip communication mechanisms between various functional blocks (or IP) for building high performance SOC designs. Given the large number of designs that use these you definitely would want to be aware of these and learn some of them in depth to upgrade your skills. If you are a VLSI engineer in the current era of increasing IP (Intellectual Property) based SOC (System on Chip) designs, it is highly likely that you would have heard about AMBA, AHB, APB, AXI, AXI-lite, ACE etc somewhere or other. ![]()
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