Creating Multiple AXI Interfaces - 2021.2 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393)

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2022-03-29
Version
2021.2 English

OpenCL kernels, C/C++ kernels, and RTL kernels have different methods for assigning function parameters to AXI interfaces.

  • For OpenCL kernels, the --max_memory_ports option is required to generate one AXI4 interface for each global pointer on the kernel argument. The AXI4 interface name is based on the order of the global pointers on the argument list.

    The following code is taken from the example gmem_2banks_ocl in the ocl_kernels category from the Vitis Accel Examples on GitHub:

    __kernel __attribute__ ((reqd_work_group_size(1, 1, 1)))
    void apply_watermark(__global const TYPE * __restrict input, 
    __global TYPE * __restrict output, int width, int height) {
     ...
    }

    In this example, the first global pointer input is assigned an AXI4 name M_AXI_GMEM0, and the second global pointer output is assigned a name M_AXI_GMEM1.

  • For C/C++ kernels, multiple AXI4 interfaces are generated by specifying different “bundle” names in the HLS INTERFACE pragma for different global pointers. Refer to Kernel Interfaces for more information.

    The following is a code snippet from the gmem_2banks example that assigns the input pointer to the bundle gmem0 and the output pointer to the bundle gmem1. The bundle name can be any valid C string, and the AXI4 interface name generated will be M_AXI_<bundle_name>. For this example, the input pointer will have AXI4 interface name as M_AXI_gmem0, and the output pointer will have M_AXI_gmem1. Refer to for more information.
    #pragma HLS INTERFACE m_axi port=input  offset=slave bundle=gmem0
    #pragma HLS INTERFACE m_axi port=output offset=slave bundle=gmem1
    
  • For RTL kernels, the port names are generated during the import process by the RTL kernel wizard. The default names proposed by the RTL kernel wizard are m00_axi and m01_axi. If not changed, these names have to be used when assigning a DDR bank through the connectivity.sp option in the configuration file. Refer to Mapping Kernel Ports to Memory for more information.