ARM Announces AMBA 3.0 Program With Participation of Over 25 Partners

CAMBRIDGE, England, Dec. 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ARM [(LSE: ARM); (Nasdaq: ARMHY)], the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor solutions, today announced that more than 25 Partners have signed up to provide support and technical contributions towards the development of the next generation of the AMBA® specification.

Twenty-five industry-leading companies have collaborated on the development of the AMBA 3.0 standard, including: Agere Systems, Agilent, Atmel, Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Conexant Systems, CoWare Inc., Infineon, LSI Logic, Mentor Graphics, Micronas, Motorola, NEC Electronics Corporation, NEC Electronics (Europe), Philips Semiconductors, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Toshiba Corporation, Verisity.

Given the strength of commitment to this Program, AMBA 3.0 technology will benefit from the most comprehensive industry-wide support possible for a communication methodology.

"The AMBA 3.0 Program is an outstanding example of the power of the ARM® Partnership," said Mike Inglis, EVP, Marketing, ARM. "Many of our Partners have made significant investments in AMBA technology-based IP and design flows. By participating in the AMBA 3.0 Program, they have protected that investment and ensured that they can continue to rely on the AMBA specification as a cornerstone of their SoC methodology."

"ARM is committed to working with its Partners to develop and promote open standards from which the whole design community can benefit," said Jonathan Morris, Systems program manager, ARM. "AMBA 3.0 technology will build on the success of the AMBA standard to date, and enable future generations of product designers to benefit from its high-performance capability."

AMBA is an open standard, freely available from ARM. It is easily accessible from the ARM web-site, www.arm.com , via a simple license agreement and is not subject to any license fee. It currently enjoys significant third-party support and is widely accepted as an industry standard for on-chip interconnect.

AMBA 3.0 technology will be available for public release in Q1'03.

EDITORS: Please note the following endorsements of the AMBA 3.0 standard which supports this press release:

Some of the Partners who collaborated on the development of AMBA 3.0 methodology have provided the following supporting quotes:

"AMBA technology has become an established standard within our industry for system-on-chip module assembly. By adopting AMBA 3.0, we will protect the significant investment that we have made in AMBA, while taking a big step forward in performance and flexibility," said Don Friedberg, director of design methodology for Agere Systems.

"AMBA 3.0 methodology brings a new step forward for high bandwidth and low latency design with backward AHB compatibility," said Michel Guellec, IP Design manager for Atmel Rousset.

"Cadence is committed to providing new technologies and services throughout the design chain as the AMBA standard continues to evolve. A major aspect of our support will be enabling smooth migration to the new release, to ensure that legacy SoC designs can take full advantage of new capabilities without loss of productivity," said Rahul Razdan, corporate vice president and general manager of the Systems and Functional Verification group at Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

"The participative nature of the AMBA 3.0 Program has ensured that the new specification will further increase both the flexibility and the performance of the protocol and yield a cross-platform adoption," said Mohamed Ben-Romdhane, IP director, Conexant Systems Inc.

"By participating in the AMBA 3.0 Program, we have been able to understand the new capabilities AMBA 3.0 technology brings to the market, enabling us to plan the additions to our existing AMBA 2.0 support. This will enable our customers to take advantage of the new standard as early as possible," said John MacDermott, director, Strategic Alliances, CoWare Inc.

"With the continual increase in system performance and the aggressive time-to-market required of Infineon's wireless business the availability of open bus standards plays an important role. Working in partnership with the industry as a whole improves efficiency in terms of tools, IP re-use and exchange. With the wide collaboration and support, the AMBA 3.0 program looks set to follow in the footsteps of AMBA 2.0. AMBA 3.0 technology certainly has some useful pipelining and posting features which will be of benefit for larger chips requiring scalable interconnects at high frequency. The case for adoption is strong, and we are in a position to support this as an industry standard," said Klaus Hau, vice president and general manager Wide Area, Secure Mobile Solutions, Infineon Technologies AG.

"AMBA 3.0 technology introduces new capabilities not just at the protocol level but also to ease physical implementation of the bus in deep sub-micron technologies. These new features will likely expand the adoption of AMBA beyond just next-generation processors SoC subsystems to other application specific areas with high-bandwidth and low-latency requirements. LSI Logic is already implementing targeted peripherals and subsystems based on the draft AMBA 3.0 standard," said Rafi Kedem, senior director of processor cores technology group at LSI Logic.

"The industry-wide acceptance of AMBA as a SoC bus standard was key in our development of Platform ExpressT, enabling us to automate the creation and verification of complex IP in SoC designs. AMBA 3.0 technology will facilitate the creation of even more sophisticated SoC designs," said Serge Leef, general manager, SoC Verification Division, Mentor Graphics.

"The joint definition of the AMBA 3.0 open standard enables interconnect schemes well adapted to tomorrow's data access requirements. This approach enables us to extend our successful in-house implementations based on current AMBA technology to new methodologies which combine our own complex building blocks with third-party IP," said Steffen Zimmermann, system engineering multimedia at Micronas.

"Motorola plans to work with ARM to merge the Motorola IP Interconnect with the future AMBA specification. At the same time, we are working with our customers to bring commercial implementations of ARM to market quickly and effectively, as shown by the rapidly growing list of global customers for our portfolio of Innovative Convergence(TM) 2.5G integrated multimedia and software solutions," said Morris Moore, vice president and director of Systems/Architecture, Wireless Broadband and Systems Group, Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector.

"Having largely standardized our internal methodology for ARM core-based SoC and macro development around AMBA 2.0, technology we are looking forward to introducing the enhanced capabilities of AMBA 3.0 methodology," said Ewald Preiss, manager, Macro Development Group, NEC Electronics (Europe).

"We believe that the AMBA 3.0 architecture will allow us to deliver the best solution to our customers," said Tomihiro Ishihara, department manager of SoC design support group, 3rd Custom LSI Division, 1st Business Development Operation Unit, NEC Electronics Corporation.

"The current generation of AMBA technology, widely supported by third party tool and IP vendors, receives broad usage within Philips. We have been able to contribute to the AMBA3.0 program and jointly define a next-generation open standard, that will address our most challenging on-chip communication needs," said Bart De Loore, general manager, ReUse Technology Group at Philips Semiconductors.

"AMBA technology has been very useful in developing our mobile application processors. We believe that the new AMBA 3.0 methodology would contribute a lot in making the SoC integration more efficient, simpler and easier, definitely with a lot of performance improvement," said Dr. Yun-Tae Lee, vice president of Mobile Solution Project at Samsung Electronics.

"We have seen open On-Chip-Bus standards combined with plug-compatible commercial IP significantly increase the productivity of SoC designers," said Mike Keating, vice president of engineering at Synopsys, a contributing member to the AMBA 3.0 standard. "Based on the success of more than 150 users of our DesignWare AMBA 2.0 IP solutions, we will continue our commitment to AMBA by delivering AMBA 3.0 implementation and verification IP."

"The evolution of the AMBA standard will allow us to ensure continuity and consistency of our ongoing and future SoC developments. We are convinced that the gain of performance offered by the AMBA 3.0 standard will allow to efficiently address communication needs for the next generation of complex SoC designs," said Luciano Raimondi, ARM design manager, DSP and Micro Division, STMicroelectronics.

"System-level interconnect can be a bottleneck that erodes performance. One of the reasons ARM CPUs have been so successful in ASIC development is that ARM had the foresight to develop the AMBA standard and have energetically deployed it. AMBA helps reduce design time for ARM core-based ASICs and is critically important for the success of ARM11," said Richard Tobias, vice president, ASIC and Foundry Business Unit, System LSI Group, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc.

"Verisity has long partnered with ARM to provide essential technology and methodology for functional verification, and we are committed to helping enable the ARM open AMBA 3.0 on-chip bus standard. Verisity will work closely with ARM to address the need for AMBA 3.0 compliance verification and e Verification Component (eVC) availability to ensure that our customers' embedded system designs are of the highest quality," said Dave Tokic, director of strategic marketing at Verisity.

About ARM

ARM is the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor solutions. The company licenses its high-performance, low-cost, power-efficient RISC processors, peripherals, and system-on-chip designs to leading international electronics companies. ARM also provides comprehensive support required in developing a complete system. ARM's microprocessor cores are rapidly becoming a volume RISC standard in such markets as portable communications, handheld computing, multimedia, digital consumer and embedded solutions. More information on ARM is available at http://www.arm.com .