Arm CSA and AMBA release provide boost for chiplet ecosystem

Nitin Dahad, embedded.com (February 16, 2024)

Two new Arm initiatives could boost chiplets: an ecosystem around the Arm chiplet system architecture, and updated AMBA specification.

Chiplets are in vogue, with the big challenges on everyone’s mind being how to put together chiplets from different providers and do it effectively. Well, the latest two initiatives from Arm could just be the kind of boost the chiplet movement could benefit from – one is the announcement of an ecosystem of partners developing the Arm chiplet system architecture (CSA), and the other is the updating of the AMBA specification for chiplets.

On the first initiative, Arm and a group of over 20 partners are analyzing and defining optimal partitioning choices for chiplet-based systems. The goal is to develop the Arm CSA, which will enable greater reuse of components (physical design IP, soft IP) between multiple suppliers. The group covers multiple market segments from mobile to automotive to infrastructure, exploring how they can better standardize around system design choices for different chiplet types, such as how to partition an Arm-based system across multiple chiplets, or their high-level properties (e.g. requirements for system memory or a root of trust).

The second initiative involves extending the AMBA specification to the chiplets market by formally releasing AMBA CHI C2C as an open specification, which will allow chiplets to be used across a wide variety of computing systems without the risk of fragmentation. AMBA CHI C2C specification leverages the existing on-chip CHI protocol and defines how it is packetized, enabling it to be transported chip(let)-to-chip(let).

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