The Arm Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) is an open-standard, on-chip interconnect specification for the connection and management of functional blocks in system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. It facilitates development of multi-processor designs with large numbers of controllers and components with a bus architecture. Since its inception, the scope of AMBA has, despite its name, gone far beyond microcontroller devices. Today, AMBA is widely used on a range of ASIC and SoC parts including applications processors used in modern portable mobile devices like smartphones. AMBA is a registered trademark of Arm Ltd.

  • Open Core Protocol (OCP) from Accellera
  • HyperTransport (HT) from AMD (though this is an off-chip interface, not on-chip bus)
  • QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) by Intel (though this is an off-chip interface, not on-chip bus)
  • virtual share from PICC - free and open source
  • TileLink - Free and open bus architecture from CHIPS Alliance

See also

  • Functional specification
  • Master/slave (technology)
  • Network on a chip, an alternative to bus-based architectures

References

  • Arm Developer AMBA Homepage - from Arm
  • AMBA Specification home page - of ARM
  • AMBA of ARM
  • AMBA Documentation - from ARM
  • AMBA 2 Specification including AHB - from ARM
  • AMBA AXI and ACE Protocol Specification AXI3, AXI4, and AXI4-Lite, ACE and ACE-Lite - from ARM
  • AMBA APB Specification including APB4, APB3, APB2 - from ARM