Single Kernel Debug - 2023.1 English

The AI Engine Pipeline view in the Vitis IDE allows you to correlate instructions executed in a specific clock cycle with the labels in the Disassembly view. The underlying AI Engine pipeline is exposed in debug mode using the pipeline view. The Vitis IDE only supports the pipeline view for graphs containing single kernels.

That is, the pipeline view is supported when your graph has AI Engine kernels targeted to a single AI Engine tile. There can only be only one single kernel in a graph or multiple kernels mapped to a single tile for the pipeline view to be enabled. So to get the pipleline view, do the following source code changes to the Peakdetector design.

1. Clone the git repository, and copy and replace all files from {GIT_TUTORIAL_PATH}/AIE_Simulation/src/kernels/ with the files in ${PROJECT_PATH}/src/kernels/. It is recommended to make a copy of the original files before replacing.

   NOTE: These source changes are done to accommodate the kernels in a single tile. As the original sources contains stream connections in between two kernels and two stream connections to PLIO; they cannot fit in a single AI Engine tile.

2. Also, replace the {GIT_TUTORIAL_PATH}/AIE_Simulation/src/graph.h with the ${PROJECT_PATH}/src/graph.h.

3. Observe the runtime ratios in the graph.h. This change from the original design makes all the kernels to be placed in a single AI Engine tile.

4. Rebuild the design, and observe the graph view in the Vitis Analyzer. Observe the single buffer between two kernels instead of ping-pong buffers. This is because now two kernels are mapped to a single AI Engine core and ping-pong buffers are not required.

5. To enable the Pipeline view on graphs with a single kernel, select Generate Profile from the Debug configurations.

6. Enter the debug, as explained in the Debug Using Vitis IDE Debugger section, to observe only a single core in the Debug window. The Pipeline View automatically comes up as soon as IDE enters the debug mode.

7. Click the Step Over button, and observe the changes in the pipeline view as well as the Cycle Count,Program Counter in Runtime statistics. The main advantage of the pipeline view is when you want to observe how many cycles a particular instruction takes.

8. Once the debug is done, hit the Resume button to complete the simulation or the Terminate button to exit the debugger smoothly.

9. Revert all the source changes to exercise the other debug features.