Vivado HLS Experience

Hi All,
I'm interested in trying High-Level Synthesis, HLS. When reading Xilinx stuff about it it looks good, however...
To me it looks more complicated than VHDL and verilog. I want to know if it is worth trying.

What are your experience of HLS?
In what type of projects or functions is it useful?

Cheers

Hi. I dont have direct experience, but a few colleagues did.
Overall conclusion was that it is good for quick prototyping and messing with simple designs, but the tools are less capable when going to more complex designs.
It requires some good FPGA knowledge to get efficient results, and what the designers didnt like is that a lot of the design will change via menu options that are not obvious - so the same code can have 2 different implementation just from a check box - coming from people with HDL experience this made people uncomfortable.
They also had to work around tool limitations at times. There were times when they were told things just couldnt be done with Vivado, but they found workarounds with slightly kludgy tcl scripts.

So if you are comfortable with HDL, then you wont enjoy HLS initially. The main target market is programmers so they can sell them FPGAs.

What are your experience of HLS?

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No experience.
But our Xilinx FAE said that DSP benchmarks are now designed exclusively with HLS - No HDL.
He said that with HLS there're able to get 70%-100% the performance compared to HDL.

In what type of projects or functions is it useful?

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As far as I understand, it works well as long as the design has a single clock domain and mainly involves well defined structures that are replicated a lot. For example - Convolution ( basically a bunch of MAC operations).

Hello,

I would like to ask one question related to porting C++ libraries using "Vivado HLS". I have encountered some dificulties when I was trying to port Arduino libray for small 1,3 inch OLED display. Here is the link for that OLED display:

https://www.waveshare.com/1.3inch-oled-a.htm

I would like to attach this display to my project based on Xilinx Spartan3 board (Elbert V2 board).

I was looking for existing code (VHDL or Verilog) for this purpose, but it was unsuccessful.

Then I decided to use "Vivado HLS" as solution for my problem. I have made few attempts to port simple general C++ libraries, and there were encouraging - generated code was readable and understandable. What was nice it also been generated in three languages: VHDL, SystemC and Verilog. After that I decide to try porting this Arduino library:

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_SSD1306/blob/master/Adafruit_SSD1306.cpp

And after some time I stalled with this task. The reason is that this library is dependent on more specialized libraries that are depending on hardware (in this case AVR ATmega microcontroller). I mean te dependency of internal hardware details of AVR microcontrolerr like internal registers, timers and interrupts.

And this is my question:

How to implement hardware related parts during porting C++ libraries to HDL language using Vivado High Level Synthesis.

So far I found some hints how to simulate interrupts:

https://https://www.edaboard.com/threads/6393/

https:///github.com/kevinpt/vhdl-extras/blob/master/rtl/extras/interrupt_ctl.vhdl

, but the problem is more general (I also mean libraries from other hardware like STM32, ARM etc.)

Coulkd I ask for some advices for my issues?

Best regards

FlyingDutch said:

I would like to attach this display to my project based on Xilinx Spartan3 board (Elbert V2 board).

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Because it migt be confusing, I would like to claryfing:

My target device during attempts to port OLED Arduino library in "Vivado HLS" was Xilinx Artix-7 (exactly XC7A35T-1CPG236C from Digilent Cmod-A7 board)

Regards

Hello,

it is hard to belive that nobody else didn't experienced similiar issues during porting C++ libraries from other hardware platforms (I mean mostly MCUs). Even hint like - "There isn't other way: just roll up your's sleevs and implement hardware related part of library by hand" would be appreciated.

Best Regards

it is hard to believe that nobody else didn't experienced similar issues during porting C++ libraries from other hardware platforms

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Maybe others consider this task as useless and just don't even try...