Quick start

For basic concepts to understand the tool, please visit the Concepts chapter. Here we give line-by-line instructions for simply running the tool out-of-the-box and getting a feel for the workflow.

Installation

pip install hls4ml

If you want to use our profiling toolbox, you might need to install extra dependencies:

pip install hls4ml[profiling]

Getting started

To with hls4ml, we provide some default example models for conversion:

import hls4ml

#Fetch a keras model from our example repository
#This will download our example model to your working directory and return an example configuration file
config = hls4ml.utils.fetch_example_model('KERAS_3layer.json')

print(config) #You can print it to see some default parameters

#Convert it to a hls project
hls_model = hls4ml.converters.keras_to_hls(config)

# Print full list of example model if you want to explore more
hls4ml.utils.fetch_example_list()

After that, you can use Vivado HLS to synthesize the model:

#Use Vivado HLS to synthesize the model
#This might take several minutes
hls_model.build()

#Print out the report if you want
hls4ml.report.read_vivado_report('my-hls-test')

Done! you've built your first project using hls4ml! To learn more about our various API functionalities, check out our tutorials here.

If you want to configure your model further, check out our Configuration page.

Apart from our main API, we also support model conversion using a command line interface, check out our next section to find out more:

Getting started with hls4ml commands (optional)

To follow this tutorial, you must first download our example-models repository:

git clone https://github.com/hls-fpga-machine-learning/example-models.git

The model files, along with other configuration parameters, are defined in the .yml files. Further information about .yml files can be found in Configuration page.

In order to create an example HLS project:

• Go to example-models/ from the main directory:

cd example-models/

• And use this command to translate a Keras model:

hls4ml convert -c keras-config.yml

This will create a new HLS project directory with an implementation of a model from the example-models/keras/ directory. To build the HLS project, do:

hls4ml build -p my-hls-test -a

This will create a Vivado HLS project with your model implmentation!

NOTE: For the last step, you can alternatively do the following to build the HLS project:

cd my-hls-test
vivado_hls -f build_prj.tcl

vivado_hls can be controlled with:

vivado_hls -f build_prj.tcl "csim=1 synth=1 cosim=1 export=1"

Setting the additional parameters to 1 to 0 disables that step, but disabling synth also disables cosim and export.

3) Further help:

• For further information about how to use hls4ml, do: hls4ml --help or hls4ml -h

• If you need help for a particular command, hls4ml command -h will show help for the requested command

• We provide a detailed documentation for each of the command in the Command Help section

To uninstall hls4ml:

pip uninstall hls4ml

Existing examples

• Examples of model files and weights can be found in example_models directory.

• Training codes and examples of resources needed to train the models can be found here.

• Other examples of various HLS projects with examples of different machine learning algorithm implementations is in the directory example-prjs.