CELL - 2024.2 English - 2024.1 English

Vivado Design Suite Properties Reference Guide (UG912)

Document ID
UG912
Release Date
2024-11-13
Version
2024.2 English

Description

A cell is an instance of a netlist logic object, which can either be a leaf-cell or a hierarchical cell. A leaf-cell is a primitive, or a primitive macro, with no further logic detail in the netlist. A hierarchical cell is a module or block that contains one or more additional levels of logic, and eventually concludes at leaf-cells.

Related Objects

Figure 1. CELL Objects

As seen in the figure above, cells have PINs which are connected to NETs to define the external netlist. Hierarchical cells also contain PORTs that are associated with PINs, and which connect internally to NETs to define the internal netlist of the hierarchy.

Leaf CELLs are placed, or mapped, onto device resources on the target AMD FPGA. The CELL can be placed onto a BEL object in the case of basic logic such as flops, LUTs, and MUXes; or can be placed onto a SITE object in the case of larger logic cells such as BRAMs and DSPs. BELs are also collected into larger SITEs, called SLICEs, so a cell can be associated with a BEL and a SITE object. SITEs are grouped into CLOCK_REGIONs and TILEs.

CELLs are also associated with TIMING_PATHs in the design, and can be associated with DRC_VIOLATIONs to help you quickly locate and resolve design issues.

You can query the CELLs associated with pins, timing paths, nets, bels, clock regions, sites, or DRC violations:

get_cells -of [get_nets clk]

Properties

There are different types of leaf-cell objects, defined by the PRIMITIVE_GROUP, PRIMITIVE_SUBGROUP, and PRIMITIVE_TYPE properties as enumerated below.

Table 1. Cell Primitives
PRIMITIVE_GROUP PRIMITIVE_SUBGROUP PRIMITIVE_TYPE
BLOCKRAM BRAM BLOCKRAM.BRAM.RAMB18E2

BLOCKRAM.BRAM.RAMB36E2

CLB CARRY CLB.CARRY.CARRY8
LUT CLB.LUT.LUT1

CLB.LUT.LUT2

CLB.LUT.LUT3

CLB.LUT.LUT4

CLB.LUT.LUT5

CLB.LUT.LUT6

LUTRAM CLB.LUTRAM.RAM32M

CLB.LUTRAM.RAM32M16

CLB.LUTRAM.RAM32X1D

MUXF CLB.MUXF.MUXF7

CLB.MUXF.MUXF8

SRL CLB.SRL.SRL16E

CLB.SRL.SRLC16E

CLB.SRL.SRLC32E

Others CLB.others.LUT6_2
CLOCK BUFFER CLOCK.BUFFER.BUFGCE

CLOCK.BUFFER.BUFGCE_DIV

PLL CLOCK.PLL.MMCME3_ADV

CLOCK.PLL.PLLE3_ADV

CONFIGURATION BSCAN CONFIGURATION.BSCAN.BSCANE2
I/O BDIR_BUFFER I/O.BIDIR_BUFFER.IOBUFDS
BITSLICE I/O.BITSLICE.BITSLICE_CONTROL

I/O.BITSLICE.RIU_OR

I/O.BITSLICE.RXTX_BITSLICE

I/O.BITSLICE.TX_BITSLICE_TRI

INPUT_BUFFER I/O.INPUT_BUFFER.HPIO_VREF

I/O.INPUT_BUFFER.IBUF

I/O.INPUT_BUFFER.IBUFDS

OUTPUT_BUFFER I/O.OUTPUT_BUFFER.IOBUFE3

I/O.OUTPUT_BUFFER.OBUF

I/O.OUTPUT_BUFFER.OBUFDS

OTHERS others others.others.others

OTHERS.others.AND2B1L

OTHERS.others.GND

OTHERS.others.VCC

REGISTER SDR REGISTER.SDR.FDCE

REGISTER.SDR.FDPE

REGISTER.SDR.FDRE

REGISTER.SDR.FDSE

RTL_GATE buf RTL_GATE.buf.RTL_INV
logical RTL_GATE.logical.RTL_AND

RTL_GATE.logical.RTL_OR

RTL_GATE.logical.RTL_XOR

RTL_MEMORY ram RTL_MEMORY.ram.RTL_RAM
rom RTL_MEMORY.rom.RTL_ROM
RTL_MUX mux RTL_MUX.mux.RTL_MUX
RTL_OPERATOR arithmetic RTL_OPERATOR.arithmetic.RTL_ADD

RTL_OPERATOR.arithmetic.RTL_MULT

RTL_OPERATOR.arithmetic.RTL_SUB

equality RTL_OPERATOR.equality.RTL_EQ
shift RTL_OPERATOR.shift.RTL_RSHIFT
REGISTER flop RTL_REGISTER.flop.RTL_REG

All cells have a common set of properties; but each cell GROUP, SUBGROUP, and TYPE can also have unique properties. You can report the properties for specific types of CELL objects by filtering on the PRIMITIVE_GROUP, PRIMITIVE_SUBGROUP or PRIMITIVE_TYPE property value.

PRIMITIVE_TYPE is an enumerated property, the defined values of which can be returned with the list_property_value command:

list_property_value -class cell PRIMITIVE_TYPE

However, a design will probably not contain cells for each defined PRIMITIVE_TYPE. The following Tcl code searches hierarchically through a design and returns unique occurrences of the PRIMITIVE_TYPE property for all the cells in the design.

foreach x [get_cells -hierarchical *] {
lappend primTypes [get_property PRIMITIVE_TYPE $x] } join [lsort -unique $primTypes] \n

From the returned list, $primTypes, you can report the properties for a specific PRIMITIVE_TYPE using the following command:

report_property -all [lindex [get_cells -hier -filter {PRIMITIVE_TYPE == <val>}] 0]

Where <val> represents the PRIMITIVE_TYPE of interest. For example, to return the properties of the BLOCKRAM.BRAM.RAM18E2 type cell:

report_property -all [lindex [get_cells -hier -filter {PRIMITIVE_TYPE == "BLOCKRAM.BRAM.RAMB18E2"}] 0]
Tip: The report_property command returns a warning that no objects were found if there are no related objects in the current design. Refer to the Vivado Design Suite Tcl Command Reference Guide (UG835) for more information on this command.

You can also return the properties from a hierarchical cell using the following Tcl command:

report_property -all [lindex [get_cells -hier -filter {!IS_PRIMITIVE}] 0]

Of course, you can also simply return the properties for the specific cell of interest:

report_property -all [get_cells <cell_name>]