New ! An easy way to install the needed board file for VIVADO

Hi !

Ok, It's been some time that I did not update this blog, but I discovered a new cool stuff, so I did some investigation on it, and there you go, here is a small article on this !

INTRO : So what is a board file anyway ??!

Xilinx provides for a long time now a very cool way to use the developement boards available thanks to the board file files !

When creating a new project, using the board file for your board instead of the FPGA reference allows you to quickly get in VIVADO everything already set up for the board ! It can save you quite some configuration time or document readings.

The only problem with this is if like me you keep changing your projects from VIVADO's versions, swaping computers or even test it on several boards, well you will spent some time on finding the board file on Google !

But YES, from 2019.1 version, things will get easier thanks to Xilinx !!


So to use it, when you create a VIVADO project, in the wizzard steps you get the possibility to set the FPGA's reference either by selecting all elements of the part reference, or you can choose a board definition file for the board your FPGA is on.

For example in VIVADO 2017.4 it gives :

This is because each VIVADO installation folder contains a reduced list of board file files.

In this example of VIVADO 2017.4 it is stored here :

Now let see what Xilinx added to help us get additionnal board file that are not provided in the default installation list.

SOLUTION 1 : Get the file within VIVADO at project creation step

Stage 1

So, when you create a VIVADO project and when you get in the Default part select wizzard, just go to the Boards tab, then you see on the right top hand corner a new button called Update Board Repositories. Click on it just like this :

Stage 2

When you Click on the Download button, it will launch the following Downloading boards pop up and, getting in a long long long long downloading time, because the whole board file catalog is downloaded !!!

Stage 3

After 8 long minutes, donwload is done and you get the whole list in the board selection tab.

You can then use the Search tool to find the board you need, select it and finalize project creation.

Stage 4

Let's analyze what has been done.

If I check the VIVADO .xpr project file content I get the following information on device reference definition.

If I compare it to an existing project where board selection has been done with the board files included on VIVADO's installation I get :

The BoardPartRepoPaths section has been added, which specifies a new path for board files. This path is added to the default one from in VIVADO installation path, it does not replace it, other boards are still available from the wizzard.

So, thanks to this BoardPartRepoPaths section it can be usefull to create and handle your own board file directory, so that your teams can always fine there the boards files for the boards you are using regularly !

Finally if we take a look in the BoardPartRepoPaths created folder we get a lot of boards files, and probably most of them not usefull for you !

CONCLUSION !

As a conclusion I would say that Xilinx provided a really cool tool, but used in the first place it may not be fully efficient for several reasons:

- It takes 8 minutes to install, if every designer of the team uses it on each of its computer, for each version of VIVADO, its time consuming,
- It installs ALL boards available, so it's HDD consuming, and I guess that you won't use more than 5% !

So I would recommand to handle this differently because Xilinx provided tcl commands to manage this data base !

SOLUTION 2 : Use TCL commands to handle additionnal Board files

Stage 1

So this new possibility has been made possible thanks to the xhub resource that provides the xilinx_board_store.

Let's try to have some information on this :

So as you can see, the destination storage folder is predefined in the LOCAL_ROOT_DIR.

This property is read only.

Anyway, the folder path in LOCAL_ROOT_DIR can be used as a temporary folder !!





UNDER CONSTRUCTION !!

Post Conclusion