ELF Association Within DFX - ELF Association Within DFX - 2026.1 English - UG909

For hierarchical flows including DFX, you can instantiate the MicroBlaze™ IP into a hierarchical portion of a design. When you synthesize the hierarchical sub-design out-of-context (OOC), the MicroBlaze path information used for ELF association has a path that represents the sub-design and not the full design. This can cause Memdata or Updatemem ELF association failures when the sub-design merges into a larger design and the MicroBlaze path is no longer valid. Using DFX, the sub-design is a reconfigurable module (RM) containing a MicroBlaze core, and the larger top-level design is the static.

Associate the ELF file before the sub-design (RM) is added to the larger design (static) to avoid such failures. Do this at the end of synthesis. The following is an example of an association after OOC synthesis:

synth_design -top $top -part $part -mode out_of_context

add_files <application>.elf
set_property SCOPED_TO_REF {base_microblaze_design} [get_files <elf_file>]
set_property SCOPED_TO_CELLS {microblaze_0} [get_files <elf_file>]
refresh_meminit

AR76684 describes the same method and includes example archives.