A input_gmio or output_gmio object is used to make external
memory-mapped connections to or from the global memory. These connections are made
between an AI Engine graph and the logical global
memory ports of a hardware platform design. The platform can be a base platform from
AMD or a custom platform that is exported
from the Vivado tools as an AMD device support archive (XSA) package.
AI Engine tools support mapping the input_gmio or output_gmio ports to the tile DMA, one to one. It does not support
mapping multiple input_gmio/output_gmio ports to one tile DMA channel. There is a limit on the
number of input_gmio/output_gmio ports supported for a given device. For example, the
XCVC1902 device on the VCK190 board has 16 AI Engine to NoC master units (NMU) in total. For each AI Engine to NMU, it supports two MM2S and two S2MM
channels. So, there can be at most 32 AI Engine
GMIO inputs, and 32 AI Engine GMIO outputs. Note
that it can be further limited by the existing hardware platform.
While developing data flow graph applications on top of an existing hardware platform, you need to know what global memory ports are exported by the underlying XSA and their functionality. In particular, any input or output ports exposed on the platform are recorded within the XSA and can be viewed as a logical architecture interface.