Xilinx Vivado High Level Synthesis: Case studies

Abstract

This paper presents case studies on the application of the Xilinx Vivado High Level Synthesis (HLS) tool-suite for C++-based design capture, simulation and synthesis to Hardware Description Language (HDL) format, and further to FPGA hardware implementation. HLS reduces the effort of HDL design capture and debug while allowing flexibility in the final hardware implementation in order to meet design constraints. HLS is not yet widely used. This paper demonstrates the practical steps in using HLS and the resulting hardware implementation. Case studies illustrate the effectiveness of HLS as a developing efficient and flexible design capture to FPGA implementation approach. The paper presents four HLS design examples, including a multiplexer, counter, register block and a skin detection image processing algorithm. Xilinx PlanAhead EDA tool-suite is used to generate a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA bitstream from the Xilinx Vivado HLS-synthesised HDL model. Each design has been implemented and tested in FPGA hardware using the Vicilogic automation and proto-typing tools developed by the authors. These tools automate the integration of designs with an FPGA IP core, which supports Ethernet I/O, SDRAM interface and a register-based I/O system. The Vicilogic Python client application environment enables GUI-based development and testing of the hardware implementation.