Xilinx Versal Architecture Reference

This document provides external links to some commonly referenced manuals/documentations about the Xilinx Versal ACAP architecture / AI Engine / AMD XDNA NPUs.

Manuals/Documentation

• Versal Adaptive SoC AI Engine Architecture Manual(AM009)
• Versal Adaptive SoC AIE-ML Architecture Manual(AM020)
• AI Engine Kernel and Graph Programming Guide(UG1079)
• AI Engine-ML Kernel and Graph Programming Guide (UG1603)
• AI Engine API Reference
• AI Engine-ML Intrinsics Reference

Resources/Projects

• Vitis Tutorials - GitHub
• Xilinx/mlir-aie - GitHub
• Xilinx/mlir-air - GitHub
• AMD/IRON - GitHub

Articles

• CHARM: Composing Heterogeneous AcceleRators for Matrix Multiply on Versal ACAP Architecture (FPGA'23)
• CHARM2.0: Composing Heterogeneous Accelerators for Deep Learning on Versal ACAP Architecture (ACM TRETS'24)
• ARIES: An Agile MLIR-Based Compilation Flow for Reconfigurable Devices with AI Engines (FPGA'25)
• Efficiency, Expressivity, and Extensibility in a Close-to-Metal NPU Programming Interface (FCCM'25)
• From Loop Nests to Silicon: Mapping AI Workloads onto AMD NPUs with MLIR-AIR (TRETS)

Doxygen Documentation

The official Doxygen documentation for the ADF APIs seems cannot be found online directly (AIE API and Intrinsics Reference are available though). However, it can be generated locally if you have the Vitis or Vitis AI installed.

To generate the Doxygen documentation for ADF APIs, follow these steps:

1. Install Doxygen on your system if you haven't already. graphviz is recommended for better visualization of class hierarchies.

sudo apt install doxygen graphviz # For Debian/Ubuntu

2. Locate the ADF source files in your Vitis or Vitis AI installation directory, typically found under <VITIS_INSTALL_DIR>/aietools/include/.
3. Create a Doxygen configuration file by running:

doxygen -g Doxyfile

4. Edit the Doxyfile to set the INPUT variable to point to the ADF source files directory. For example:

INPUT = /path/to/vitis/aietools/include/ \
        /path/to/vitis/aietools/include/adf/

5. Modify other settings in the Doxyfile as needed, such as:

GENERATE_LATEX = NO
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = /path/to/output/directory
RECURSIVE = YES
PROJECT_NAME = "ADF API Documentation 2025.2"

6. Run Doxygen with the configuration file:

doxygen Doxyfile

7. The generated documentation will be available in the specified output directory, typically under html/index.html. Open this file in a web browser to view the ADF API documentation.