An AI Engine kernel can either consume or produce blocks of data, or, it can access and produce data streams in a sample-by-sample fashion. The data access APIs for both cases are described in the following sections.
Window-Based Access
From the kernel perspective, incoming blocks of data is called an input window. Input windows are defined by the type of data contained within that window. The following example shows a declaration of an input window carrying complex integers where the real and imaginary parts are both 16 bits wide.
input_window_cint16 myInputWindow;From the kernel perspective, outgoing blocks of data is called an output window. Again, these are defined by type. The following example shows a declaration of an output window carrying 32-bit integers.
output_window_int32 myOutputWindow;A kernel reads from its input windows and writes to its output windows. By default, the synchronization required to wait for an input window of data or provide an empty output window is performed before entering the kernel. There is no synchronization required within the kernel to read or write the individual elements of data. In other words, the kernel will not execute unless there is a full window available.
In some situations, if you are not consuming a windows worth of data on every
invocation of a kernel, or if you are not producing a windows worth of data on every
invocation, you can control the buffer synchronization by configuring the kernel
port to be async in the Block Parameters dialog box
of the kernel.
It is also possible to have overlap from one block of input to the next. This in general is required for certain algorithms such as filters. This overlap is referred to as 'Window Margin'. If a Window margin is specified, the kernel has access to a total number of samples equal to window_size + margin_size.
The behavior of the window margin can be demonstrated using the following example.
Here, input is a vector of size 8 and this is
fed to the kernel block which is configured to have a window size of 6 with and a window margin of 2, as shown in the previous figure. The kernel should have access to a
total of 8 samples at every invocation. During the
first simulation cycle, two 0's are prepended to
the first 6 new values from the input data. For the
subsequent simulation cycles, the kernel receives 8
values which includes 6 new values and 2 values from the previous cycle.
Stream-Based Access
Kernels can access data streams in a sample-by-sample fashion using data access APIs. With a stream-based access model, kernels receive an input stream or an output stream of typed data as an argument. Each access to these streams is synchronized ( i.e., reads stall if the data is not available in the stream and writes stall if the stream is unable to accept new data). There is also a direct stream communication channel between one AI Engine and the physically adjacent AI Engine, called a cascade.
The following example shows a declaration of input and output streams of type
cint16.
input_stream_cint16 * myInputStream;
output_stream_cint16 * myOutputStream;