AXI4 Implementations in FPGA Designs

Learn AXI4 Bus implementation for your next FPGA design in Intel/Altera or AMD/Xilinx

A full instructional series for all aspect of the AXI4 Bus protocol, including AXI4 Stream, AXI4-Lite, and AXI4.  Each flavor of AXI4 has a bus flow, handshake, and signal requirements described in detail.  An example implementation for a Master and Slave in each of the subsets of AXI4 are included, with simulation demonstrations using example testbenches in edaplayground, and vivado, included using the vivado block diagram with AXI4 Protocol checking.

We learn the differences between each of the AXI4 flavors, where the AXI4 Stream protocol is used for uni-directional bulk data transfers from a master to a slave without addressing information.   The AXI4 Stream protocol is the easiest to implement and the most common. 

The AXI4-Lite protocol is the other common interface that we learn how to implement.   We get a full understanding of how the AXI4-Lite Master handshakes with the AXI4-Lite Slave with both address and data, and allows single word writes and reads, with slave responses on valid or error transactions.

The full AXI4 protocol provides the highest data bandwith with burst modes up to 256 words of size 128 bytes.  With 5 separate busses, including an Address Write Bus, a Data Write bus, an Address Read Bus, a Read Bus, and a Write Reponse bus, each with separate handshaking, there is an extensive understanding required to implement the RTL components successfully.