TIM-VX - Tensor Interface Module

TIM-VX is a software integration module provided by VeriSilicon to facilitate deployment of Neural-Networks on Verisilicon ML accelerators. It serves as the backend binding for runtime frameworks such as Android NN, Tensorflow-Lite, MLIR, TVM and more.

Main Features

• Over 150 operators with rich format support for both quantized and floating point
• Simplified C++ binding API calls to create Tensors and Operations Guide
• Dynamic graph construction with support for shape inference and layout inference
• Built-in custom layer extensions
• A set of utility functions for debugging

Framework Support

• Tensorflow-Lite (External Delegate)
• Tengine (Official)
• TVM (Fork)
• MLIR Dialect (In development)

Feel free to raise a github issue if you wish to add TIM-VX for other frameworks.

Architecture Overview

Get started

Build and Run

TIM-VX supports both bazel and cmake.

Cmake

To build TIM-VX:

mkdir host_build
cd host_build
cmake ..
make -j8
make install

All install files (both headers and *.so) is located in : host_build/install

Cmake option:

CONFIG: Set Target Platform. Such as: A311D, S905D3, vim3_android, YOCTO. Default is X86_64_linux.

TIM_VX_ENABLE_TEST: Build the unit test. Default is OFF.

TIM_VX_USE_EXTERNAL_OVXLIB: Use external OVXLIB. Default is OFF.

EXTERNAL_VIV_SDK: use external VX driver libs. By default is OFF.

run unit test:

cd host_build/src/tim
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/../../../prebuilt-sdk/x86_64_linux/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
./unit_test

Bazel

Install bazel to get started.

TIM-VX needs to be compiled and linked against VeriSilicon OpenVX SDK which provides related header files and pre-compiled libraries. A default linux-x86_64 SDK is provided which contains the simulation environment on PC. Platform specific SDKs can be obtained from respective SoC vendors.

To build TIM-VX:

bazel build libtim-vx.so

To run sample LeNet:

# set VIVANTE_SDK_DIR for runtime compilation environment
export VIVANTE_SDK_DIR=`pwd`/prebuilt-sdk/x86_64_linux

bazel build //samples/lenet:lenet_asymu8_cc
bazel run //samples/lenet:lenet_asymu8_cc

Other

To build and run Tensorflow-Lite with TIM-VX, please see README

To build and run TVM with TIM-VX, please see TVM README

Support

create issue on github or email to ML_Support@verisilicon.com