MPMC M-4 ARM Cortex - M Architecture

AMBA

• Stands for Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture
• Developed by ARM in the 1990s
• AMBA is the most popular bus in the SoC world

Objectives of AMBA

1. Right First Time Architecture: To facilitate the RFT development of embedded microcontroller products with one or more CPUs or signal processors
2. Technology independent: AMBA protocols are independent of specific semiconductor technologies, and hence peripheral and system components designed using AMBA can be reused across different manufacturing technologies, improving portability and reducing development costs.
3. Modular system: To improve processor independence, providing a development roadmap for advanced cached CPU cores and the development of peripheral libraries
4. Minimized Silicon Infrastructure: To minimize the silicon infra required to support efficient on-chip and off chip communication for both operation and manufacturing.

Types of AMBA buses

• There are 5 distinct type of buses defined within the AMBA specification:
  1. Advanced High Performance Bus (AHB)
  2. Advanced System Bus (ASB)
  3. Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB)
  4. Advanced Trace Bus (ATB)
  5. The AMBA Extensible Interface (AXI)

The AMBA AHB

The AMBA APB