Design of AMBA™ wrappers for multiple-clock operations

AMBA™ (advanced microcontroller bus architecture) is a widely-used on-chip bus standard proposed by ARM. The AMBA™ protocol assumes that all IPs are synchronized by a common clock. However, real-world SoCs often require IPs to run at different clock frequencies. The paper proposes a novel AMBA™-based SoC architecture that allows the integration of IPs with different operating frequencies. In the proposed architecture, wrappers are used when IPs with different clock frequencies are connected to the AMBA™ bus. These wrappers are fully compatible with the AMBA™ protocols so that any IPs compatible with the AMBA™ protocols can be used without any modification. Example timing diagrams are given to show the operations of the proposed architecture.