Design Flows

The common tool and library pre-requisites that apply across all design flows are documented in the requirements section above.

Recommended design flows are decribed as follows:

Setup the build environment using the Vitis and XRT scripts, and set the PLATFORM_REPO_PATHS to installation folder of platform files.

source <install path>/Vitis/2020.2/settings64.sh
source /opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.sh
export PLATFORM_REPO_PATHS=/opt/xilinx/platforms

The recommend flow to evaluate and test L1 components is described as follows using Vitis HLS tool. A top level C/C++ testbench (typically algorithm_name.cpp) prepares the input data, passes them to the design under test, then performs any output data post processing and validation checks.

A Makefile is used to drive this flow with available steps including:

  • CSIM (high level simulation),
  • CSYNTH (high level synthesis to RTL),
  • COSIM (cosimulation between software testbench and generated RTL),
  • VIVADO_SYN (synthesis by Vivado), and
  • VIVADO_IMPL (implementation by Vivado).

The flow is launched from the shell by calling make with variables set as in the example below:

. /opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.sh
export PLATFORM_REPO_PATHS=/opt/xilinx/platforms
cd L1/tests/specific_algorithm/
# Only run C++ simulation on U250 card
make run CSIM=1 CSYNTH=0 COSIM=0 VIVADO_SYN=0 VIVADO_IMPL=0 DEVICE=xilinx_u250_xdma_201830_2

As well as verifying functional correctness, the reports generated from this flow give an indication of logic utilization, timing performance, latency and throughput. The output files of interest can be located at the location of the test project where the path name is correlated with the algorithm. i.e. the callable function within the design under test.

To run the Vitis projects for benchmark evaluation and test, you may need the example below:

./opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.sh
export PLATFORM_REPO_PATHS=/opt/xilinx/platforms
cd L1/benchmarks/specific_algorithm/
# Run software emulation for correctness test
make run TARGET=sw_emu DEIVCE=xilinx_u250_xdma_201830_2
# Run hardware emulation for cycle-accurate simulation with the RTL-model
make run TARGET=hw_emu DEIVCE=xilinx_u250_xdma_201830_2
# Run hardware to generate the desired xclbin binary
make run TARGET=hw DEIVCE=xilinx_u250_xdma_201830_2
# Delete xclbin and host excutable program
make cleanall