REF_NAME is a read-only property on cells of the design indicating a logical cell name that uniquely identifies the cell.
This property is defined automatically by the Vivado Design Suite, and can not be modified by the user in either HDL or XDC. It is intended for reference only.
The property does not influence any steps but is very useful in defining filters and other Vivado Tcl command queries to identify specific cells or other objects.
For example, to select the clock pins on RAM cells, you can filter the pin objects based on the REF_NAME property of the cells:
get_pins -hier */*W*CLK -filter {REF_NAME =~ *RAM* && IS_PRIMITIVE}
TIP: When an RTL module is instantiated multiple times in the design, synthesis sequentially numbers the original REF_NAME property to provide a unique identifier for each cell. In this case, the ORIG_REF_NAME property is used to store the original RTL module name (REF_NAME). As a result, you can filter both on REF_NAME and ORIG_REF_NAME to identify all instances of the cell:
get_cells -hierarchical \
-filter {ORIG_REF_NAME == FifoBuffer || REF_NAME == FifoBuffer}
Architecture Support
All architectures.
Applicable Objects
•Cells (get_cells)
Values
Not applicable
Syntax
Not applicable
Affected Steps
None