The Standard for On-Chip Communication

AMBA is an open standard for the connection and management of functional blocks in a System-on-Chip. Arm AMBA specifications are widely adopted as the standard for on-chip communication, and provide interface standards for IP re-use. This helps reduce the risks and costs of developing multi-processor designs with many controllers and peripherals.

Features and Benefits
Flexibility

IP re-use requires a common standard that supports a wide variety of SoCs with different power, performance and area requirements. AMBA has the flexibility to match these requirements, offering design choice and extending performance and scalability to compatible processors.

Wide Adoption

AMBA specifications have a long heritage of dependability and trust, and are used in a large amount of standards-based IP worldwide. eFlash and other non-volatile memory technologies can be easily adopted across the IoT ecosystem, and it is the most widely adopted industry standard for on-chip connectivity for IP products, including memory controllers, interconnects, trace solutions, GPUs, and CPUs. 

Compatibility

AMBA specifications ensure compatibility and scalability between IP components from different design teams or vendors across the IoT ecosystem. AMBA specifications are available as both a written specification as well as a set of assertions that unambiguously define the interface protocol, thus ensuring this level of compatibility.

Support

The wide adoption of AMBA specifications throughout the semiconductor industry has driven a comprehensive market in third party IP products and tools to support the development of AMBA-based systems. The availability of SystemVerilog assertions for AMBA promotes this industry-wide participation.

Talk with an Expert

Interested in solving the challenge of mass adoption and scalability for IoT devices? Talk to an Arm expert about how AMBA specifications can help.

Contact Us
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AMBA Specification Resources

Everything you need to know to make the right decision for your project. Includes technical documentation, industry insights, and where to go for expert advice.

 

  • GFB (Generic Flash Bus Controller): An interface between the system and Flash or other non-volatile storage technology that splits the Flash controller into 2 parts, generic and process-dependent.
  • CHI (Coherent Hub Interface): The highest performance, used in networks and servers.
  • ACE (AXI Coherency Extensions): Used in Arm big.LITTLE systems for smartphones, tablets, etc.
  • AXI (Advanced eXtensible Interface): The most widespread AMBA interface. Connect 100s of Masters and Slaves in complex SoCs.
  • AHB (Advanced High-Performance Bus): The main system bus in microcontroller usage.
  • APB (Advanced Peripheral Bus): Minimal gate count for peripherals.
  • ATB (Advanced Trace Bus): For moving trace data around the chip, see Arm CoreSight.
  • LPI (Low Power Interfaces): For power and clock management of SoC components.
AMBA Documentation