The Vivado® Design Suite is board aware. The tools know the various interfaces present on the target boards and can customize and configure an IP to be connected to a particular board component. Several standard 7 series boards are available in the Vivado® Design Suite, as well as an UltraScale™ architecture board.
You also have the ability to define custom board files to add to the tool. See this link in the Vivado Design Suite User Guide: System-Level Design Entry (UG895) for more information on the Board Interface file.
The IP integrator shows all the interfaces to the board in a separate Board window. When you use this window to select components and the Designer Assistance offered by IP integrator, you can easily connect your block design to the board components of your choosing. This flow generates all the I/O constraints automatically.
User-defined or third-party Board Interface files, and associated files, can be downloaded from GitHub at https://github.com/Xilinx/XilinxBoardStore/wiki/Xilinx-Board-Store-Home.
From the Xilinx Board Store page:
- Click Code, as shown in the following figure.
- Click the Clone or download pull-down button to open the Clone with HTTPS dialog box.
- Click Download ZIP.
- Save the boards at a location of your choice.
These boards can then be added to a board repository for use by the Vivado Design Suite by setting the following parameter when launching the Vivado tool:
set_param board.repoPaths [list “<path1>” “<path2>” “...”]
Where <path> is the path to a directory containing a
single Board Interface file, and files referenced by the board.xml
file, such as part0_pins.xml and preset.xml.
The <path>
can also specify a directory with
multiple subdirectories, each containing a separate Board Interface file. For
example:
set_param board.repoPaths [list "C:/Data/usrBrds" "C:/Data/othrBrds"]