syn.directive.alias - 2023.1 English

Vitis Unified IDE and Common Command-Line Reference Manual (UG1553)
Document ID
UG1553
Release Date
2023-07-17
Version
2023.1 English

Description

Specify that two or more M_AXI pointer arguments point to the same underlying buffer in memory (DDR or HBM) and indicate any aliasing between the pointers by setting the distance or offset between them.

Important: syn.directive.alias applies to top-level function arguments mapped to M_AXI interfaces.

Vitis HLS considers different pointers to be independent channels and generally does not provide any dependency analysis. However, in cases where the host allocates a single buffer for multiple pointers, this relationship can be communicated through syn.directive.alias and dependency analysis can be maintained. This enables data dependence analysis in Vitis HLS by defining the distance between pointers in the buffer.

Requirements for syn.directive.alias:

  • All ports must be assigned to M_AXI interfaces and also assigned to different bundles, as shown in the example below
  • Each port can only be used in one syn.directive.alias command
  • All ports assigned to syn.directive.alias must have the same depth
  • When offset is specified, each port can have one offset
  • The offset for the M_AXI port must be specified as slave or direct, offset=off is not supported

Syntax

syn.directive.alias=[OPTIONS] <location> <ports>
  • <location> is the location string in the format function[/label] that the ALIAS pragma applies to.
  • <ports> specifies the ports to alias.

Options

distance=<integer>
Specifies the difference between the pointer values passed to the ports in the list.
offset=<string>
Specifies the offset of the pointer passed to each port in the ports list with respect to the origin of the array.

Example

For the following function top: 

void top(int *arr0, int *arr1, int *arr2, int *arr3, ...) {
  #pragma HLS interface M_AXI port=arr0 bundle=hbm0 depth=0x40000000
  #pragma HLS interface M_AXI port=arr1 bundle=hbm1 depth=0x40000000
  #pragma HLS interface M_AXI port=arr2 bundle=hbm2 depth=0x40000000
  #pragma HLS interface M_AXI port=arr3 bundle=hbm3 depth=0x40000000
The following command defines aliasing for the specified array pointers, and defines the distance between them:
syn.directive.alias=top arr0,arr1,arr2,arr3 distance=10000000
Alternatively, the following command specifies the offset between pointers, to accomplish the same effect:
syn.directive.alias=top arr0,arr1,arr2,arr3 offset=00000000,10000000,20000000,30000000

See Also