AMBA is an on-chip bus architecture introduced in 1996 by ARM that defines the protocol for connecting processor and peripheral components. It has evolved over time to include buses like AHB for high performance, ASB for systems, and APB for low-power peripherals. AMBA is now an open standard for on-chip communication and the latest version, AMBA 4 from 2010, defines advanced interfaces like ACE and AXI that are used in modern ARM processors.

1. AMBA BUS
Advanced Micro controller Bus
Architecture

2. AMBA
• Advanced microcontroller bus architecture
• On-chip bus protocol from ARM
• On-chip interconnect specification for the
connection and management of functional blocks
including processor and peripheral devices.
• Introduced in 1996
• AMBA is registered trademark of ARM Limited.
• AMBA is open standard.

3. AMBA History
AMBA
• ASB
• APB
AMBA 2 (1999)
• AHB
• widely used on ARM7,ARM9 and ARM
Cortex-M based designs.
• ASB
• APB2(or APB)

4. AMBA History
AMBA 3 (2003)
• AXI3(or AX1v1.0)
• Widely used on ARM Cortex-A processors
including Cortex-A9
• AHB Lite v1.0
• APB3 v1.0
• ATB v1.0
AMBA 4 (2010)
• ACE
• Widely used on the latest ARM Cortex-A
processors including Cortex-A7 and
Cortex-A15
• AC E-Lite
• AXI4
• AXI4-Lite
• AXI-Stream v1.0
• ATB v1.1
• APB4 v2.0

5. Bus hierarchies
• AMBA standards covers various bus
specifications in different versions.
• Advanced High –performance Bus(AHB)
• Advanced System Bus(ASB)
• Advanced Peripheral Bus(APB)
• Advanced Trace Bus(ATB)
• Advanced Extensible Interface(AXI)

6. Typical system

7. Advanced High- performance
Bus(AHB)
• The AMBA AHB is for high-performance, high
clock frequency system modules.
• Pipelined operation
• Burst transfers
• Multiple bus masters
• Split transactions

8. Advanced System Bus (ASB)
• The AMBA ASB is for high performance system
modules.
• Pipelined operation
• Burst transfers
• Multiple bus masters

9. Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB)
• The AMBA APB is for low-power peripherals.
• Latched address and control
• Simple interface
• Suitable for many peripherals