ARM show new AMBA specs: think FPGAs and multicore

By _EDN Practical Chip Design

March 8, 2010

ARM this morning took the wraps off its plans for release of a new silicon interconnect specification: AMBA 4. The company intends to publicly describe AMBA 4 in two phases during this year. IP products implementing the specification will follow later in the year.

Director of marketing for fabrics Michael Dimelow explained that evolution in ARM's markets has created requirements for the new spec. One set of driving forces is exemplified by ARM's joint development with Xilinx. The point of that work is not to implement a small ARM core in an FPGA. That's a solved problem. Rather, the work focuses on creating a framework for advanced SoCs—such as Internet-Protocol switch and packet-processor ICs—with substantial ARM CPUs, function-specific accelerators, and large embedded RAMs. Such chips are not small-scale microcontroller-like implementations, nor are they prototypes of ASIC designs. They are in themselves multicore SoCs that attempt to exploit the enormous potential bandwidth of the latest FPGAs.

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