In this blog post, we introduce AMBA C2C, a new specification being developed with the AMBA ecosystem. It provides a unified and scalable approach to connecting AMBA protocols across chiplets, including AMBA AXI and AMBA CHI.

Chiplet technology and AI are evolving rapidly, bringing new benefits and protocol requirements.

AMBA CHI C2C has established strong momentum as a foundational protocol for chiplets and chip-to-chip (C2C) connectivity. It is particularly suited to fully coherent, advanced heterogeneous compute and superchips.

However, chiplets span a much wider range of use cases. These include memory expansion, IO and accelerator attach, and advanced heterogeneous systems. Each use case comes with different requirements and trade-offs in functionality, performance, bandwidth efficiency, and implementation complexity.

AMBA CHI C2C already supports scalability in implementation complexity through a property negotiation mechanism. Implementations can support only the capabilities they need while preserving interoperability across chiplet types, vendors, and generations.

Our continued collaboration with the ecosystem has highlighted an important additional requirement. Many chiplets do not need the full feature set of advanced coherent systems and require an even simpler approach for C2C connectivity. This is particularly important for the vast installed base of AXI-based designs. These designs can benefit from the greater reuse and composability that chiplets enable.

This has been an important focus area since we first introduced AMBA CHI C2C in 2023 . At that time, we discussed how C2C connectivity could extend to simpler, often AXI-based use cases. Partner feedback since then has reinforced the need for a unified and converged C2C approach for AMBA protocols.

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