From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture was introduced in 1996 and is widely used as the on-chip bus for ARM processors. The first AMBA buses were Advanced System Bus (ASB) and Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB). In its 2nd version, ARM introduced AHB that is a single clock-edge protocol. This protocol is today a de-facto standard for 32-bit embedded platforms because it is well documented and can be used without royalties. In 2003, ARM introduced the 3rd generation of AMBA including AXI high-performance interconnect. Some manufacturers utilize AMBA bus for non-ARM design. As example Infineon uses AMBA bus for the ADM5120 SoC based on the MIPS architecture.

AMBA is designed for use in System-on-a-chip (SoC) systems. The important aspect of a SoC is not which components or blocks it houses, but how they are implemented. AMBA is a solution for the blocks to interface with each other.

The AMBA 2.0 specification and AMBA 3 AXI specification define four buses/interfaces:

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

The timing aspects of the bus and the voltage on the bus are not specified in the specifications.

The objective of the AMBA specification is to

• be technology independent
• to enhance design reusability using IP cores
• encourage modular system design to improve processor independence
• minimalize silicon infrastructure

The PrimeCell Peripherals are AMBA bus-compliant, synthesizable intellectual property (IP) cores developed by ARM for SoC integration. The PrimeCell Peripherials family includes UARTs (PL010, PL011), SDRAM and FLASH memory controllers (PL172), DMA engines e.t.c.

• Opencores Wishbone bus
• Sonics Silicon Backplane
• IBM CoreConnect Bus Technology

This computer hardware-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.