AXIM: A Programmable Simulation Environment for FPGA Kernels with AXI Interfaces
Long Lin, Cuncun Shi, He Yang · 2023
In the recent decade, the development of FPGA kernels raises its level of abstraction from RTL to HLS C or OpenCL. And so are the simulation and debugging software suites. However, it makes some existing high-quality RTL simulators incompatible to use. Therefore, we propose AXIM, a programmable simulation environment that integrates existing RTL simulators for FPGA kernels with interfaces at a high-level abstraction via AXI buses. AXIM consists three modules, including AXIM hardware driver, AXIM runtime library, and AXIM debugger. Experimental results show that AXIM runs faster than the one integrated with Xilinx Vitis. Besides, another experiment demonstrates that visualization analysis of DRAM's activities generated by AXIM can help developers optimize the design of kernels. As a side product, we also identify an inconsistent behavior in hardware emulation in Xilinx Vitis 2019.2 about data transfer using AXI interfaces.