Waveform View and Live Waveform Viewer - 2023.2 English

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

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2023-12-13
Version
2023.2 English

The Vitis core development kit can generate a Waveform view when running hardware emulation. It displays in-depth details at the system-level, CU level, and at the function level. The details include data transfers between the kernel and global memory and data flow through inter-kernel pipes. These details provide many insights into performance bottlenecks from the system-level down to individual function calls to help optimize your application.

The Live Waveform Viewer is similar to the Waveform view, however, it provides even lower-level details with some degree of interactivity. The Live Waveform Viewer can also be opened using the Vivado logic simulator, xsim.

Note: The Waveform view allows you to examine the device transactions from within the Vitis analyzer (see Working with the Analysis View (Vitis Analyzer)). In contrast, the Live Waveform Viewer opens the Vivado simulation waveform viewer to examine the hardware transactions in addition to any user selected signals.

Waveform data is not collected by default because it requires the runtime to generate simulation waveforms during hardware emulation, which consumes more time and disk space. Refer to Generating and Opening the Waveform Reports for instructions on enabling these features.

Figure 1. Waveform View

You can also open the waveform database (.wdb) file with the Vivado logic simulator through the Linux command line:

xsim -gui <filename.wdb> &
Tip: The .wdb file is written to the directory where the compiled host code is executed.