3.5.3.5 Icicle Kit Reference Design

The Icicle Kit Reference Design is described in the following image:

On the top left-hand side is the Microprocessor Sub-System (MSS). This is a hardened module on the PolarFireSoC devices. It contains four RISC-V cores, DDR memory, a hardened DMA controller, and related components. MSS components are connected internally with a TileLink switch, and interface with the FPGA fabric with both an AXI4 Initiator and AXI4 Target interface over an AXI switch. There are four available AXI Fabric Interface Controllers (FIC) available on the MSS. However, the reference design only uses three (FIC0, FIC1 and FIC3) as shown on the diagram. For more details on the MSS, please see the PolarFire SoC MSS Technical Reference Manual.

On the top right-hand side of the diagram is the FPGA fabric. There are three sub-blocks created to group logic related to a specific FIC and keep the top-level design clean. SmartHLS™-generated hardware modules and accelerators are automatically instantiated and connected under the FIC_0_PERIPHERALS sub-module, which has three AXI interconnects: FIC_0_INITIATOR, DMA_INITIATOR and HLS_AXI_INTERCONNECT. The first two are part of the Icicle Kit Reference Design and are used to demonstrate how to control a soft-DMA module and LSRAMs (not shown in the diagram) from the MSS. The FIC_0_INITIATOR is used to transfer data in the MSS to Fabric direction, and the DMA_INITIATOR transfers data in the fabric to MSS direction. SmartHLS reuses those AXI interconnects to connect the HLS_AXI_INTERCONNECT and one or more accelerators in the design

An example architecture of a SmartHLS-generated module is shown at the bottom of the diagram. It has an AXI4 Target interface, and depending on the specified interface type, it can have an AXI4 Initiator interface as well. Each AXI target argument in the C++ function has a corresponding on-chip storage accessible to the MSS via AXI transactions and is also directly connected to the core of the hardware accelerator. In this case argA, argB and argC are AXI target arguments. The type of storage can be a local memory such as LSRAMs for pointer arguments (argA and argB), or simple flip-flop registers for scalar arguments (argC). AXI Initiator arguments (argD) do not require additional storage since they directly access the MSS memory, such as external DDR.

The interfaces are created based on the pragma, #pragma HLS interface argument(<arg_name>) type(axi_target/axi_initiator) (see AXI4 Target Interface for Pointer Argument , AXI4 Initiator Interface for Pointer Argument ). For details on the different data transfer methods for the AXI Target/Initiator arguments, see SoC Data Transfer Methods.