AI Engine Trace from VCD - 2023.2 English

AI Engine Tools and Flows User Guide (UG1076)

Document ID

UG1076

Release Date

2023-12-04

Version

2023.2 English

The vcdanalyze utility is provided to generate an AI Engine event trace from the VCD file. This process is integrated into the Vitis tool flow automatically. From the Vitis IDE, after a simulation run has finished capturing AI Engine events, you can right-click on the project from the Explorer view and select Analyze AIE Events. The trace data is produced under the current project at trdata.aiesim/ and various views are automatically loaded into the current project.

The raw event trace under the directory trdata.aiesimevents.txt should look like the following:

time=1741000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=65536,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1742000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=196610,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1743000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=327684,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1743000,event=CORE_RESET,col=1,row=0
time=1744000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=458758,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1745000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=589832,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1746000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=720906,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1747000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=851980,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1748000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=983054,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1749000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=1,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1750000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=131075,data1=0,tlast=0
time=1751000,event=FROM_PL,name=tl.me.shim.tile_0_0.pl_interface.pl_to_shim0.data0,col=0,streamid=0,data0=262149,data1=0,tlast=0
time=2186000,event=DM_WRITE_REQ,col=0,row=0,port=tl.me.array.tile_0_1.mm.dm.port_AXI_write_b6
time=2190000,event=DM_WRITE_REQ,col=0,row=0,port=tl.me.array.tile_0_1.mm.dm.port_AXI_write_b7
time=2194000,event=DM_WRITE_REQ,col=0,row=0,port=tl.me.array.tile_0_1.mm.dm.port_AXI_write_b6
time=2198000,event=DM_WRITE_REQ,col=0,row=0,port=tl.me.array.tile_0_1.mm.dm.port_AXI_write_b7
time=2202000,event=DM_WRITE_REQ,col=0,row=0,port=tl.me.array.tile_0_1.mm.dm.port_AXI_write_b2
time=2206000,event=DM_WRITE_REQ,col=0,row=0,port=tl.me.array.tile_0_1.mm.dm.port_AXI_write_b3

The following command produces the AI Engine trace data for foo.vcd in text form in the ./trdata.aiesim/events.txt file.

vcdanalyze -vcd foo.vcd

Tip: Use vcdanalyze -h to get help for the command.

The following command produces a CSV file from the AI Engine trace data from the foo.vcd file.

vcdanalyze -vcd=foo.vcd -csv

The following command produces the waveform data files from the AI Engine trace data from the foo.vcd file.

vcdanalyze -vcd foo.vcd -wdb

Note: The simulator models the hardware performance of AI Engine as much as possible. The AI Engine simulator can be more optimistic than the actual hardware, where two DMA FIFOs in the same AI Engine tile are accessed via the same (North, East, West or South) interface. For this corner case, there is arbitration in the memory controller shared between to the DMA FIFOs; this effect is not fully reflected in the simulation.