Vitis Unified software platform that unlocks new device experiences for all developers

     Xilinx, a global leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, announced Vitis™ (pronounced V-TIS) - a unified software platform that will allow developers, including software engineers and AI scientists, to benefit from the benefits of flexible hardware. Built over five years and a total of 1,000 man-years, the Vitis Unified software platform automatically ADAPTS and uses Xilinx hardware architectures based on software or algorithmic code without requiring in-depth hardware expertise.

     In addition, the Vitis platform does not restrict the use of proprietary development environments, but can be plugged into common software development tools and utilizes a wealth of optimized open source libraries, allowing developers to focus on the development of algorithms. Vitis is separate from the Vivado design suite, which continues to support users who want to program with hardware code. However, Vitis is also able to increase the productivity of hardware developers by encapsulating hardware modules into functions that software can call.

     Victor Peng, President and CEO of Xilinx, said: "As computing needs grow exponentially, engineers and scientists are often limited by the performance of fixed chips. Xilinx has created a design environment that enables programmers and engineers across disciplines to co-develop and optimize their hardware and software using tools and frameworks they already know and master. This means they can adapt the hardware architecture to their own applications without the need for a new type of chip."

     The base layer is the Vitis target platform. The platform consists of a circuit board and pre-programmed I/O. The second layer, called the Vitis Core Development Suite, covers the open source Xilinx runtime library to manage the movement of data between different domains, including subsystems, the AI engine within the upcoming Versal ACAP™, and the necessary external hosts. In addition, this layer also provides core development tools such as compilers, profilers, and debuggers. While Xilinx provides a world-class design environment, these tools are designed to seamlessly integrate with industry-standard build systems and development environments.

     On the third tier, eight Vitis libraries offer more than 400 optimized open source applications. The eight libraries are: Vitis Basic Linear Algebra Subroutine (BLAS) library, Vitis Solver library, Vitis security library, Vitis Vision Library, Vitis Data compression library, Vitis Metrological finance library, Vitis database set and Vitis AI library. With these libraries, software developers can use standard application programming interfaces (apis) to achieve hardware acceleration.

     The fourth and most transformative layer of the Vitis platform is Vitis AI. It integrates domain-specific Architecture (DSA). DSA provides hardware implementations of AI models that developers can configure and program using industry-leading frameworks such as TensorFlow and Caffe. Vitis AI provides a toolchain that optimizes, quantifies, and compiles in minutes to efficiently run pre-trained AI models on Xilinx devices.

     In addition, it provides a dedicated API for edge-to-cloud deployments, enabling industry-leading inference performance and efficiency. Silinx will soon launch another DSA (Vitis Video) that supports encoding directly from FFmpeg and provides the same super-simple and extremely powerful end-to-end video solution. The Dsas offered by partner companies include Illumina integrated with GATK for genetic analysis, BlackLynx integrated with ElasticSearch for big data analysis, and the proprietary DSA currently being used by our customers.