Xilinx embraces open source community introducing Vitis Unified Software Platform

In the field of modern computer architecture, it becomes more and more challenging to develop competitive products and solutions. In this connection, Xilinx, the world-leading programmable logic devices supplier, decided to ease this process. At Xilinx Developers Forum in San Jose, California, Xilinx announced the new open-source platform to facilitate this process. Meet Vitis – a new framework for developing applications that use Xilinx FPGAs. The main goal of the environment is to let developers from all disciplines to co-create and optimize software & hardware, within the frameworks and tools they already familiar to them.

What are the advantages of the new platform?

Efficiency.

The main advantage of the announced software suite for engineers is that it allows design hardware using common-used programming languages like C++ or Python. It eases their work so much that there is no more need to use multiple environments and implement further integration. As a result, there is increased efficiency. 

Adaptivity.

The platform enables developers to tailor the hardware architecture to the algorithm code without intervention. There is an opportunity to adapt hardware for data centers, heterogeneous computing applications, and AI. 

Rich functionality.

The platform includes around 400 optimized open-source applications within eight Xilinx Vitis libraries, which makes it possible to enable optimized domain-specific accelerators in a vast amount of applications.

At the moment, there is free access to the platform for Xilinx boards. Eight libraries with documentation, examples, tutorials, and the platform itself will be available at the end of this month. You’ll be able to reach it on a Xilinx new website or a GitHub under the Apache license.

Cover image, photo, and video source: Xilinx