AMBA Interconnect Technology Gains Further Industry Momentum

AMBA Design Kit secures 35 licensees in just six months

CAMBRIDGE, UK – Mar. 25, 2002 – ARM [(LSE: ARM); (Nasdaq: ARMHY)], the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC processor solutions, today announced that it has signed 35 design licensees for the AMBA® Design Kit since its release last year, further demonstrating wide industry acceptance of AMBA technology. The licensees will use the AMBA Design Kit to significantly improve their system-on-chip (SoC) design flows.

The AMBA Design Kit provides a generic, stand-alone environment to enable the rapid creation of AMBA technology-based components and SoC designs. Containing a comprehensive set of basic components and several example system designs, the AMBA Design Kit reduces time-to-market by providing the common foundations for product design based upon the AMBA interface. This frees up engineers to focus on application-specific issues to maximize product performance and obtain the best results from the high-performance capabilities of AMBA technology.

"AMBA has clearly established itself as a de facto standard for interconnect within our industry," said Jonathan Morris, ARM Infrastructure program manager. "The strong uptake of the AMBA Design Kit by our Partners, including recent licensees Agere Systems and Toshiba, adds to the momentum that AMBA technology has already achieved."

"We expect the AMBA Design Kit will provide us with a significant time-to-market advantage in the development of AMBA technology-based SoC designs, so it makes sense for us to adopt it within our design flow," said Don Friedberg, director, Methodologies and Systems Design at Agere Systems.

"AMBA technology remains the keystone of our interconnect strategy for ARM® processor-based designs, and the AMBA Design Kit offers a comprehensive library of components on which to build. The high-quality source code contained in the AMBA Design Kit provides excellent value to our design flow," said Koji Kito, senior manager of Network System LSI Department, Network & Telecom System LSI Division at Toshiba's Semiconductor Company.

The AMBA specification is generally regarded within the IC design industry as one of the most popular, easy-to-use and widely-supported interconnect standards available. With a wide third-party IP base and extensive EDA tool support from many of the industry's leading EDA suppliers, AMBA technology provides a top-to-bottom solution for interface-based design of high-performance systems.

Since the AMBA interface is processor and technology independent, it enhances the reusability of peripheral and system macrocells across a wide range of applications. To date, the specification has been adopted by more than 90 percent of ARM's Partners, downloaded from the ARM web site by more than 2000 engineers, and has been successfully implemented in hundreds of ASIC designs.

Price and availability
The AMBA Design Kit is available from ARM now, contact sales@arm.com for details.

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, hand-held computing, multimedia digital consumer and embedded solutions. More information on ARM is available at www.arm.com.