What’s New for Vitis Software Platform 2022.2 – Major Feature Enhancements

Editor's Note: This content is contributed Eddie Wu, Product Marketing Manager for Vitis Unified Software Platform at AMD

Vitis™ unified software platform 2022.2 has been released. Major feature enhancements include the following:

New Vitis Library Functions for Versal AI Engine Arrays

• DSP library functions - enhanced features
• Solver library functions
• Vision library functions
• Ultrasound library functions

Design Flow Enhancements for Versal Devices

• Control of relative placement of kernels in AI Engine arrays for higher performance and better utilization
• Enhanced profiling and debugging capabilities for Versal® ACAP designs - deadlock detection, larger trace data collection, and RTL/Python test bench support
• New simulation options for heterogeneous designs in the Vitis integrated design environment

Let's go through some of the major highlights!

For Vitis software platform 2022.2, the Vitis libraries have been enhanced to support more functions for AIE arrays

• The DSP library now supports Super Sample Rate (SSR) FIR filters on AIE arrays with a coefficient reload feature and dynamic point size. An FFT windowing element has been added to the FFT function that targets the AIE array.
• For the Solver library, two new matrix decomposition functions have been added for AIE arrays called QR decomposition and Cholesky decomposition. These are frequently requested matrix operations.
• The Vitis Vision library adds four new functions for AIE arrays: GTM (Global Tone Mapping), Color Correction Matrix, 3D LUT, and Dynamic Reconfiguration with V4L2.
• A new Ultrasound library has been made available with 2022.2, which includes L1 to L3 level functions.
  • L1 routines provide BLAS-like functions for ultrasound.
  • L2 routines provide AIE graphs for functions like focusing, apodization, and b-spline.
  • L3 routines provide ultrasound subsystems such as synthetic aperture, plane wave, and scanline beamforming.

More details on the Vitis library functions for AI Engines from 2022.1 to 2022.2 are provided below.

Versal ACAP Design Flow Enhancements

AI Engine Compiler

For this version, AI Engine relative constraints provide a way to control relative placement of kernels in the AI Engine array. This allows users to get higher performance and better utilization from the AI Engine array. The constraints can be defined in both ADF (Adaptive Data Flow) graph format and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

ADF and JSON graph syntax examples are shown below.

New Features for Vitis Tool Simulation and Analyzing

1. AI Engine profiling, debugging, and analyzing with the Vitis analyzer

For 2022.2, AIE status can be analyzed during the HW emulation phase in the Vitis analyzer to help with debug. Before this release, users had to build the design in hardware to do the same analysis. This feature enables users to profile earlier than the hardware build, which speeds up iterations and helps shorten the design cycle.

Deadlock detection has been enabled through xbutil and XRT on Linux since 2022.1. Now the same is supported using XSDB (Xilinx System Debugger). This is useful for bare-metal users. A JSON file can be produced that is equivalent to the file generated by xbutil and can be imported into the Vitis analyzer for viewing.

A flow for deadlock detection is shown below.

This new feature expands the support from the XRT to XSDB flow based on the AI Engines.

2. Support for PS applications on x86 host machine for SW emulation

SW emulation now allows users to compile and run processing system (PS) applications on an x86 simulator in addition to QEMU for embedded platforms, which allows for faster SW emulation. This function avoids the overhead of creating SD card images and booting Linux in QEMU and enables quicker turnaround. Users can focus on high-level functional models by using XRT to control accelerated kernels. Xilinx runtime library (XRT) must be installed on the host before using this function.

3. SystemC functional models for HW emulation in addition to RTL

Compared to RTL, SystemC functional models enable faster compilation and less execution time. Users can also mix the C and RTL kernels to debug RTL blocks. For this version, C/C++ kernels, as well as AXI4-Memory Map and AXI4-Stream-based kernels, are supported.

New simulation options now expand the range of functional simulation flows available to the user, as shown below. These new flows are primarily to aid with fast functional simulation.

4. Support for simulating an AI Engine kernel with a simple RTL test bench or Python script-based traffic generator

This feature allows users to reuse RTL test benches as traffic generators (TGs) or to create one using Python. A kernel can be validated standalone without the full platform.

The RTL simulator uses the test bench, and x86SIM/AIESIM simulates the C or AI Engine kernel code, leveraging the Unix sockets and XTLM IPC interface to establish communications between the two processes, as shown below.

With Vitis software platform 2022.2, we now support Python, VHDL, Verilog, and SystemVerilog-based traffic generators.

Next Steps

Download Vitis unified software platform 2022.2 to explore the latest features and new functionalities.

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