The new Vitis Unified IDE manages designs at the component level and the System project level. The top-level System project can contain different components, such as the Application component that holds the source code for PS or X86 applications, the HLS component (PL kernel), the AI Engine component (graph), and the Platform component, all of which can be separately developed, built, and analyzed in the new Vitis Unified IDE.
Components are the basic building blocks in the Vitis Unified IDE. There are multiple types of components:
- The AI Engine Component as described in Building and Running an AI Engine Component
- The HLS Component as described in Building and Running an HLS Component
- The Application Component described in Creating an Application Component
- The Platform Component as described in Creating a Platform Component
Each component contains source code and configuration files. The component can be built within their own scope and can be run or debug on their own, or together with other components in a System project. The System assembles multiple components for a system design. It contains the component link configuration. When building a System project, the new Vitis Unified IDE will run, link and package using the build output of the included components. If the required component output files are not available, the Vitis Unified IDE will prompt you to build each component.
The metadata for components are stored in vitis-comp.json; the metadata for applications are stored in vitis-sys.json, as well as links to the configuration files
for building, linking and packaging the system and its components.