Vitis High-Level Synthesis

Accelerates Kernel and IP Creation by Enabling C++ Specifications

Overview

Advanced algorithms used today in AI, wireless, medical, defense, and consumer applications are more sophisticated than ever before. Vitis™ High-Level Synthesis included as a no cost upgrade in all Vivado Editions, accelerates IP creation by enabling C++ specifications to be directly targeted into Xilinx programmable devices without the need to manually create equivalent RTL designs. Supporting both the Vitis and Vivado design environments Vitis HLS provides software and hardware designers alike with a faster path to kernel or IP creation through:

Abstraction of algorithmic description, data type specification with integer, fixed-point or floating-point and interfaces (FIFO, Memories, AXI4)
Extensive libraries for including built-in support for arbitrary precision data types, streams and vectorized data types
Directives driven architecture-aware synthesis that delivers the best possible QoR
Fast time to QoR that rivals hand-coded RTL
Accelerated verification using C/C++ test bench simulation, automatic VHDL or Verilog simulation and test bench generation
Automatic use of Xilinx on-chip memories, DSP elements including for floating-point types

Libraries

The following built-in libraries are included with Vitis HLS:

Name	Description
Arbitrary Precision Data Types	Integer and fixed-point (ap_int.h)
HLS Streams	Models for streaming data structures. Designed to obtain best performance and area (hls_stream.h)
Vector types	Vectorized types and operations (hls_vector.h) including for arbitrary precision types
HLS Math	Extensive support for the synthesis of the standard C (math.h) and C++ (cmath.h) math libraries. The support includes floating point and fixed-point functions: abs, atan, atanf, atan2, atan2, ceil, ceilf, copysign, copysignf, cos, cosf, coshf, expf, fabs, fabsf, floorf, fmax, fmin, logf, fpclassify, isfinite, isinf, isnan, isnormal, log, log10, modf, modff, recip, recipf, round, rsqrt, rsqrtf, 1/sqrt, signbit, sin, sincos, sincosf, sinf, sinhf, sqrt, tan, tanf, trunc

The Vitis high-level synthesis tool also supports the Vitis performance-optimized libraries available on Github with out-of-the-box acceleration with minimal to zero-code changes to your existing applications. These common Vitis accelerated-libraries include advanced Math, Statistics, Linear Algebra, and DSP to offer core functionalities for a wide range of applications. These libraries offer acceleration for workloads like Vision and Image Processing with OpenCV, Quantitative Finance, Database, and Data Analytics, Data Compression and more...

Documentation