The Vitis™ unified software platform is a tool that combines all aspects of Xilinx® software development into one unified environment. The Vitis software platform supports both the Vitis embedded software development flow, for Xilinx Software Development Kit (SDK) users looking to move into the next generation technology, and the Vitis application acceleration development flow, for software developers looking to use the latest in Xilinx FPGA-based software acceleration. This content is primarily concerned with the application acceleration flow, and use of the Vitis core development kit and Xilinx Runtime (XRT).
The Vitis application acceleration development flow provides a framework for developing and delivering FPGA accelerated applications using standard programming languages for both software and hardware components. The software component, or host program, is developed using C/C++ to run on x86 or embedded processors, with OpenCL™ API calls to manage runtime interactions with the accelerator. The hardware component, or kernel, can be developed using C/C++, OpenCL C, or RTL. The Vitis software platform promotes concurrent development and test of the Hardware and Software elements of an heterogeneous application.
As shown in the figure above, the Vitis unified software platform consists of the following features and elements:
- Vitis technology targets acceleration hardware platforms, such as the Alveo™ Data Center accelerator cards, and Versal® or Zynq® UltraScale+™ MPSoC-based embedded processor platforms.
- XRT provides an API and drivers for your host program to connect with the target platform, and handles transactions between your host program and accelerated kernels.
- Vitis core development kit provides the software development tool stack, such as compilers and cross-compilers, to build your host program and kernel code, analyzers to let you profile and analyze the performance of your application, and debuggers to help you locate and fix any problems in your application.
- Vitis accelerated libraries provide performance-optimized FPGA acceleration with minimal code changes, and without the need to re-implement your algorithms to harness the benefits of Xilinx adaptive computing. Vitis accelerated libraries are available for common functions of math, statistics, linear algebra and DSP, and also for domain specific applications, like vision and image processing, quantitative finance, database, data analytics, and data compression. For more information on Vitis accelerated libraries, refer to https://xilinx.github.io/Vitis_Libraries/.