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CoreLink Interconnect - AMBA on-chip connectivity

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AMBA is the de-facto standard for on-chip communication.

The CoreLink™ Interconnect Family provides on-chip AMBA connectivity for components implementing any combination of AMBA^® AXI™, AHB™, AHB-Lite, APB™ and APB3 interfaces.

ARM has announced the new CoreLink 400 series which includes two new interconnect products: the CoreLink CCI-400 Cache Coherent Interconnect and the CoreLink NIC-400 Network Interconnect supporting the AMBA 4 protocol interfaces to maximize performance and minimize latency and power. The previous Network Interconnect (NIC-301) with its QoS-301 Advanced Quality of Service option and AMBA Design Kit (ADK) have been licensed by over 100 companies and shipped in millions of units of consumer electronics.

Why CoreLink Interconnect?

How to Choose

Customer Successes

Resources

Interconnect improves system performance and reduces power

Massive growth in system integration places on-chip communication and interconnect at the centre of system performance. Traffic interactions have become complex and, if left unchecked can cause poor, unpredictable system performance.

The CoreLink Interconnect family from the home of AMBA is the lowest risk solution for on-chip communication. Designed and tested with ARM Cortex and Mali processors, CoreLink interconnect from ARM provides balanced service for both low latency and high bandwidth data streams.

The CoreLink Interconnect family includes the following products for AMBA protocols:

CoreLink CCI-400 Cache Coherent Interconnect for AMBA 4 CPU clusters and I/O coherency
CoreLink NIC-400 Network Interconnect fully configurable for AMBA 3 and long bursts with AMBA 4
Network Interconnect (NIC-301) for AMBA 3 systems including support for AXI, AHB and APB
Advanced Quality of Service (QoS-301) option for NIC-301
AMBA Design Kit (ADK) for AMBA 2 systems including AHB and APB

Cache Coherency across clusters of CPU, GPU and accelerators

The CoreLink CCI-400 provides full coherency between the L2 caches of two multicore Cortex-A15 processors and I/O coherency with up to three other master, such as the Mali GPU, sharing data in either of the L2 caches of the Cortex-A15 processors. The CCI-400 routes traffic to up to three slaves (e.g. two high performance channels to the memory controler and one to the rest of the system) using virtual channels to prevent blocking and barriers to preserve ordering.

Network features in CoreLink Network Interconnect (NIC-400, NIC-301)

The CoreLink interconnect family delivers key technologies commonly associated with network-on-chip products:

Predictability of physical implementation
Communication control for system performance optimization
Communication visibility for software optimization
Reliable integration of complex system containing third party IP core

The CoreLink NIC-400 comes with options for QoS traffic regulation (QoS-400), virtual channels to prevent blocking (QVN-400) and thin links to reduce wiring (TLX-400). The NIC-400 supports long bursts in AXI4 for higher efficiency streaming media and hierarchical clock gating to dramtically reduce idle power.

Increasing performance with AMBA 3 AXI

The majority of high performance ARM designs now use the AMBA 3 AXI standard, especially for the high performance low latency connection from processor to dynamic memory controller.

Technical features of the high-performance AMBA 3 AXI protocol include:

Uni-directional channel architecture. Information flow is in one direction only, enabling very simple bridging between clock domains. This reduces the gate count and hence timing penalty when signals traverse complex SoCs.
Support for multiple outstanding transactions. This enables parallel execution of bursts, resulting in greater data throughput. This facilitates both high performance when required, and low power as tasks complete in a shorter time.
Independent Address and Data channels. This enables per-channel optimization, by breaking timing paths as required to maximize clock frequency and minimize latency.
Increased flexibility. With symmetrical Master and Slave interfaces, AXI technology can be easily used for anything from point-point to multi-hierarchy systems.

Ease of interconnect design speeds time to market

The CoreLink Interconnect family gives SoC architects the fastest time to market for products that deliver unparalleled internet multi-media experience.

The CoreLink Interconnect family includes the following products for AMBA protocols:

CoreLink CCI-400 Cache Coherent Interconnect for AMBA 4 coherent clusters of CPU and GPU
Network Interconnect (NIC-400, NIC-301) for AMBA 3 systems including support for AXI, AHB and APB
Advanced Quality of Service (QoS-301) option for AMBA Network Interconnect (NIC-301)
AMBA Design Kit (ADK) for AMBA 2 systems including support for AHB and APB

The latest interconnect products built on AMBA 3 AXI have backwards compatibility with the large existing base of AMBA 2 AHB IP. If you have any AXI masters or slaves in your system then you should use the NIC-301 product.

The following reference will help you choose the appropriate interconnect for a given ARM processor, or Mali graphics core.

Interconnect for Cortex-A15 and Mali-T604 processors

You should choose CoreLink CCI-400 Cache Coherent Interconnect.

Interconnect for Cortex-A, Mali, and ARM11 MPCore processors

You should choose Network Interconnect (NIC-301) with Advanced Quality of Service (QoS-301).

Interconnect for Cortex-R, ARM1156 and ARM1176 processors

You should choose Network Interconnect (NIC-301). If your system contains many masters with different traffic requirements (latency critical, bandwidth critical, best effort) then you should also consider Advanced Quality of Service (QOS-301).

Interconnect for Cortex-M, Mali-55, ARM9, ARM1136 processors

You should choose AMBA Design Kit (ADK) for fast configuration of embedded systems containing Cortex M-Series processors with an AMBA AHB interface.

CoreLink Interconnect is mature and widely used

The CoreLink interconnect family of AMBA products has been successfully deployed by more than 200 customers into mobile, home, automotive & enterprise networking product markets.

The CoreLink Network Interconnect (NIC-301) is widely licensed to more than 35 leading semiconductor vendors and used in more than 100 SoC tape outs.

Customer Quotes

Customer	Quote
	“ARM’s ability to deliver significant IP, including high performance on-chip interconnect, together with ARM’s strong commitments to support Broadcom’s needs, are helping us decrease time to market for an increasing number of important products.” Dr. Edward Frank, Corporate VP of R&D, Broadcom.
	"ARM is supplying not just a processor but peripheral IP essential for SoC products, which holds great attraction in terms of speedy development of future products and getting them to the market,” said Takashi Yoshimori, Technology Executive, SoC Design, Semiconductor Company, Toshiba Corporation. “We have been impressed with ARM’s expertise and quality in this field, as well as with the comprehensive support available.”
	“Samsung has already achieved considerable success with products based on the ARM architecture, one of the most advanced building blocks for future digital electronics,” said Sung Bae Park, vice president, System LSI Division, Samsung Electronics. “The ARM technology [all ARM^® processors and AMBA^®on-chip interconnect and controller IP] will be integrated into our product portfolio for next-generation electronic products, including portable media players and mobile internet devices. We look forward to continuing our long and fruitful relationship with ARM.”

Customer Satisfaction Survey (2009) Results

Most customers are either 'satisfied' or 'very satisfied' with the NIC-301
Existing customers say that NIC-301 is easy to use and is fast to generate RTL
More than 95% of customers who have used NIC-301 expect to continue to use it.

What customers said they liked about NIC-301:

"All required features for SoC architecture were available"
"Highly configurable”
"Customizable”

Demonstrations of CoreLink Network Interconnect for AMBA

A demonstration on video of how to configure and optimize the CoreLink Network Interconnect (NIC-301)using AMBA Designer and Verification & Performance Exploration (VPE) tools.