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You will find the Vitis HLS Knowledge Base useful as it contains tips and reminders. Remember to always use the HLS component template from the previous practical.

Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life (henceforth Life) is a well-known cellular automaton. If you are not familiar with Life, it is a 2-dimensional grid of cells in which each cell may be in two states, either 'alive' or 'dead'. On each time step, some cells die, some come to life, and some stay the same. Fixed rules determine how each cell changes from one time step to the next. You can see an example of the game on this page. The rules are as follows.

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Use a grid of size 10 by 10. It is up to you how you represent this grid and what protocol the testbench will use to communicate with your hardware. It is also up to you how you treat the edges of the grid (wrap around or not).

Subtask 1

Construct a testbench that prints a test grid, and then sends it to the hardware. One naïve way of representing the grid is shown below, but you can likely think of a better way.

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Remember what we talked about in the lecture. You are not trying to pass in your grid through the AXI slave interface (arg1, arg2 etc.) The grid is already in ram.

Subtask 2

Once your hardware is working, use the directives in HLS to optimise the design. You must aim for a design with a latency below 900 clock cycles (it is possible to get down to around 200-300 with some work). Don't worry about how much hardware you are using. Go straight for speed!

When you have completed this task show a demonstrator who will mark it as completed in your logbook.

Tips:

• You will want to use the ARRAY_PARTITION directive to split up your arrays, because if they are implemented using BRAMs then can only support 2 accesses in parallel. If you apply this to a multidimensional array you will need to set the dimension to 0 for the tools to partition all dimensions.
• Your hardware should use the contents of its input grid to determine the state of a completely new grid, and return that new grid. If you try to keep it all in one grid and start editing it 'live' you'll get incorrect results.