Hardware Emulation - 2023.2 English

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

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2023-12-13
Version
2023.2 English
VSC mode when compiled for the hardware emulation target (-t hw_emu) will generate RTL from the accelerator sources and run RTL simulation along with the application layer code. To view simulation waveforms the user can enable the following switch in the xrt.ini file:
[Emulation]
debug_mode=gui
Figure 1. Simulation Waveform View

The picture above shows the waveforms viewer in the Vivado XSim interface. By default, VSC will create grouped waveform objects corresponding to the compute() interface. The kernel code must be compiled with -g flag, otherwise the grouping will error out in Vivado XSim. In this design, there are four instances (NCU=4) of the accelerator enumerated as grouped objects vadd*CU_0 through vadd*_CU_3. Each of these groups further contains the signals that correspond to compute() arguments, in1, in2, out, and size. The group kernel_execution is also auto-created and contains the ap_start and ap_done signals for each CU instance.

Tip: In hardware emulation, the timing of the start signals is not timing accurate with respect to realistic hardware behavior. This is because interactions of the host with the emulation model (data transfer latency over PCIe or with DDR/HBM memories), and application will not reflect real-time hardware execution behavior. However, the timing from the start to a stop of a compute() call is cycle-accurate.