Moving from AMBA AHB to AXI Bus in SoC Designs: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The ever increasing amount of logic that can be placed onto a single silicon die is driving the development of highly integrated SoC designs. Such high computing power must be matched by interconnect fabrics with adequate bandwidth and efficiency. Traditional SoC interconnects, as exemplified by AMBA AHB, are based upon low-complexity shared buses, in an attempt to minimize area overhead. Such architectures, however, are not adequate to support the trend for SoC integration, motivating the need for more scalable designs. This paper describes the most important AMBA bus architectures and how they evolved to accommodate to the ever increasing complexity of SoC technology.