Interface definitions provide the capability to group functional signals into a common interface grouping to use between IP in an AMD Vivado™ IP integrator diagram. The interface definition give you more a comprehensible diagram, and also enforces a standardized expectation that signals are designed to work between IP pairs.
AMD provides many interface definitions, including standardized AXI protocols and other industry standard signaling; however, some legacy or custom implementations have unique IP signaling protocols.
You can define your own interface and capture the expected set of signals, and ensure that those signals exist between IP.
The Create Interface Definition option uses the IP-XACT industry standard specification.
The interface definitions use two files that together correspond to a bus definition
file (myInterface.xml) and an abstraction definition file
(myInterface_rtl.xml).
The Vivado IDE uses the created interface definition to support mapping logical ports and inferring bus interfaces on the IP Definition in the IP packager.
The IP packager bus interface algorithms are based on the bus definitions and are almost completely data driven. The algorithm works similarly with AMD-provided definitions and user created interfaces.
AXI4 memory-mapped and AXI4-Stream interfaces have additional DRC checks beyond the data-driven heuristics.
See Inferring Signals for more information about signal naming and inferring signal names.