ARM announces AMBA-4 phase one

LONDON: ARM Holdings plc, the processor intellectual property licensor, based in Cambridge, England, has announced the availability of phase one of the AMBA-4 specification for on-chip communication.

ARM Holdings had introduced the original AMBA specification over 15 years ago. The AMBA-3 was launched in 2003.

According to ARM Holdings, the AMBA-4 specification has been written with contributions from 35 companies, including vendors of OEMs, semiconductor and EDA. Early adopters of the specifications include Cadence, Mentor, Arteris, Sonics, Synopsys, and Xilinx.

The phase one of the AMBA-4 specification includes definition of an expanded family of AXI interconnect protocols, including AXI4, AXI4-Lite, and AXI4-Stream.

The AXI4 protocol adds support to longer bursts and quality-of-service (QoS) signaling. While the long-burst support helps in the integration of devices with large block transfers, while QoS signaling gives the ability to manage latency and bandwidth in complex multi-master systems, ARM Holdings said n a statement.

ARM Holdings has extended the AMBA-4 specification and the AXI4 protocols to support FPGA implementations. AXI4-Lite is a sub-set of the full AXI4 specification for simple control register interfaces – reducing SoC wiring congestion and simplifying implementation. The AXI4-Stream protocol, ARM Holdings said, offers a streaming interface for non-address-based, point-to-point communication, like video data and audio data.