Vitis – Xilinx Command Line Terminal Development

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution is all about accelerating digital transformation. Organizations of every type are creating data-driven business models which look to derive maximum value out of what they now see as their most asset. Data collection and analysis mean more data centers, which in turn require skilled professionals to run them. Today, data centers are turning to AI to autonomously manage various tasks, from server optimization to equipment monitoring.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are a class of silicon devices that can be configured by the end-user to serve a variety of purposes. flexible nature, FPGAs have found applications in countless industries, including (but not limited to) defense, manufacturing, supercomputing, telecommunications, and healthcare. More recently, they have been positioned as the answer to the challenges of running artificial intelligence (AI) at scale. Within the data center, FPGAs are particularly suitable for building hardware accelerators.

For all their benefits, one enduring criticism levelled at FPGAs is the complexity of the software development process, and the company is attempting to solve this with a free developer environment called Vitis. Using Vitis, users can write software for FPGAs in familiar high-level languages such as C, C++ and OpenCL. Meanwhile, ACAP devices enable ML inference to be coded at the framework level – using familiar tools like Caffe, PyTorch, or TensorFlow.

So, the work focuses on embedded software development for Vitis unified software by Xilinx Inc. Major work has been carried out on commands for Xilinx Software Command-Line Tool (XSCT). Xilinx Software Command-line Tool is an interactive and scriptable command-lineinterface to Xilinx SDK. As the outcome, this Internship work carried out at AMD Xilinx Inc. Contribution has been done for developing commands for the XSCT i.e., Vitis CLI depends onthe customer requirements and company product roadmaps and in the area of Vitis Software backend tools. Backend tools consist of various embedded development tools like debuggers, bootable image creators etc.