AXI4 Interconnect Paves the Way to Plug-and-Play IP (WP379) - The AXI4 specification represents a major evolutionary step in interconnect technology for on-chip system design. The value of the AXI4 interconnect has many facets, beginning with an immediate gain in productivity derived from a unified IP interconnect standard that supplants legacy and custom interconnect architectures. The three interconnect protocols developed for the AXI4 standard (AXI4, AXI4-Lite, and AXI4-Stream interfaces) provide the flexibility to optimize an FPGA design for performance, throughput, latency, or area.