CoreLink AMBA Designer

Features Summary

• Provides configuration engines for AMBA IP which employs designer knowledge to automatically check for non-optimal and mutually exclusive configuration options
   
• GUI drag and drop integration environment to allow for rapid assembly of configured PrimeCell components and even 3rd party imported components
   
• Industry standard IP-XACT 1.2 and 1.4 support for imported components and busdefs for the purpose of IP-XACT based top level Verilog generation/stitching
   
• Support for parsing top-level Verilog modules and generating IP-XACT 1.2 component definitions by auto identification and grouping of bus-signals into busdefs, manually over-ridden as required.

Benefits Summary

• Rapid configuration of AMBA components from ARM
   
• Rapid assembly of configured ARM Cortex A, R and M series processors, Mali graphics hardware and AMBA IP components
   
• Maximizes re-use of existing configurations by allowing the user to create an IP library

Main ADR-301 Components

The ADR-301 suite consists of a canvas and configurators.

The canvas is a graphical application that you can use to create new systems and modify existing ones. A system consists of leaf components or other sub-systems. You can create and manipulate systems using a graphical representation that shows the components, their ports, and the connections between ports. The picture of the ADR-301 canvas below breaks down into three main areas that are all inter-linked:

1. The main drawing area of the canvas where components from the component library window are drag and dropped and their ports connected. Here designs are stitched together to generate top level Verilog and IP-XACT output
2. Bottom left is the Configurator and hierarchy window. The hierarchy tab shown in the example allows the user to navigate more easily large designs by quickly identifying blocks and signals and 'zooming' in on selected items. The configurator window is described in the paragraph below.
3. The user component library window, comprises a library of pre-configured component instances, which were either generated by a configurator, or imported from either a Verilog or an IP-XACT description. It is from this window that components can be drag and dropped onto the main drawing area for assembly/stitching.

 
The configurators tab, from the diagram above, provides a list of AMBA components that can be configured before generating RTL. See the related product tab on this page for a full list of AMBA components that are available. The diagram below shows a configurator window from an AMBA network interconnect NIC-301. The configurator here is showing the detailed topology inside a network interconnect configuration, and has color-coded each of the data widths.Note also the access paths available to a selected master, highlighted for readability.Other views provided by this configurator are architecture and address map views. Each configurator however will have its own layout depending on the complexity of the System IP is configuring.

As mentioned above, you can stitch together components and interconnects to generate top-level RTL modules for AMBA interconnect-based systems after executing the RTL generation from any given configurator. 

Note: ADR-301 ships with all supported configurators on a rolling update basis, if a configurator is not present for the Fabric System IP that you have recently purchased, you may need to update your ADR-301 installation. Note also that the RTL generation step is only available for each System IP that is licensed, downloaded and installed from ARM.  ADR-301 and System IP can be downloaded from https://connect.arm.com . Please note that you will need a connect Gold access license to download ADR-301 or any other System IP.

ADR-301 is also compatible with the following ARM System IP products:

ADR-301 will enable configuration and stitching of the above components within its GUI environment. Because ADR-301 imports IP-XACT files for stitching, 3rd party components can also be imported for RTL stitching only.

Note: The BP010 is a development kit containing many discrete components. Only the AHB busmatrix component is configured using ADR-301

Verifying the Performance of your AMBA Interconnect

Once a NIC-301 component has been rendered, VPE-301 components can be instantiated onto each of its AXI interfaces for the purposes of performance exploration. Please see the VPE-301 product in this section for further details

User Guides

AMBA3 AXI Protocol Checker User Guide

White papers

Traffic management for optimizing media intensive SoCs

IP-XACT Specifications

IP-XACT 1.4 and 1.2 specifications are currently released