What is the Vivado Design Suite? - 2021.2 English

Vivado Design Suite User Guide: Getting Started

Document ID
UG910
Release Date
2021-10-27
Version
2021.2 English

The Vivado® Design Suite is designed to improve productivity. This tool suite is architected to increase the overall productivity for designing, integrating, and implementing systems using UltraScale™ ™, 7 series, and Versal® devices, Zynq® UltraScale+™ MPSoCs and, Zynq®-7000 SoCs. Xilinx® devices are now much larger and come with a variety of new technology, including stacked silicon interconnect (SSI) technology, up to 28 gigabyte (GB) high speed I/O interfaces, hardened microprocessors and peripherals, analog mixed signal, and more. These larger and more complex devices create multidimensional design challenges, when handled incorrectly, that can prevent the achievement of faster time-to-market and increased productivity. With the Vivado Design Suite, you can accelerate design implementation with place and route tools that analytically optimize for multiple and concurrent design metrics, such as timing, congestion, total wire length, utilization and power. The Vivado Design Suite provides you with design analysis capabilities at each design stage. This allows for design and tool setting modifications earlier in the design processes where they have less overall schedule impact, thus reducing design iterations and accelerating productivity.

The Vivado Design Suite replaces the ISE Design Suite. It replaces all of the ISE Design Suite point tools, such as Project Navigator, Xilinx Synthesis Technology (XST), implementation, CORE Generator™ tool, Timing Constraints Editor, ISE Simulator (ISim), ChipScope™ ™ Analyzer, Xilinx Power Analyzer, FPGA Editor, PlanAhead™ design tool, and SmartXplorer. All of these capabilities are now built directly into the Vivado Design Suite and leverage a shared scalable data model. Built on the shared scalable data model of the Vivado Design Suite, the entire design process can be executed in memory without having to write or translate any intermediate file formats, which accelerates run times, debug, and implementation while reducing memory requirements. The Vitis™ IDE can be launched from Vivado. This is designed to be used for the development of embedded software applications targeted towards Xilinx embedded processors.

All of the Vivado Design Suite tools are written with a native tool command language (Tcl) interface. All of the commands and options available in the Vivado integrated design environment (IDE), which is the graphical user interface (GUI) for the Vivado Design Suite, are accessible through Tcl. The Vivado Design Suite also provides powerful access to the design data for reporting and configuration as well as the tool commands and options.

You can interact with the Vivado Design Suite using:

  • GUI-based commands in the Vivado IDE
  • Tcl commands entered in the Tcl Console in the Vivado IDE, in the Vivado Design Suite Tcl shell outside the Vivado IDE, or saved to a Tcl script file that is run either in the Vivado IDE or in the Vivado Design Suite Tcl shell
  • A mix of GUI-based and Tcl commands

A Tcl script can contain Tcl commands covering the entire design synthesis and implementation flow, including all necessary reports generated for design analysis at any point in the design flow.