Vivado Toolchain Improvements

Altium Designer’s FPGA toolchain integration has been expanded to cater for the latest releases of the Xilinx Vivado 2014 development environment.

To enable installed toolchains for FPGA place and route processes in Altium Designer, the system automatically detects and registers a wide range of FPGA development tools from different vendors. The system supports multiple versions from the same vendor, and now includes full recognition of the current Vivado 2014 range.

The path settings for the currently registered toolchains are available in the FPGA – Place & Route page of the Preferences dialog.

Select a preferred toolchain or enter a specific path to a tool installation.

In the Toolchain Options window, the currently registered path to each toolchain installation is shown and can be enabled or disabled by the matching Use radio button. Where multiple toolchains are installed from the same vendor, a specific version can be enabled depending on the preferred device used in a design.

The Vivado 2014 IDE is typically installed in the C:\Xilinx\Vibado\2014xx directory. If necessary, the path to an installed (and compatible) toolchain can be manually specified by selecting the <User Specified> option and entering the exact path.

Select the Specified option button to manually enter a toolchain path.

Expanded Checkpoint version support

The Xilinx Vivado design system uses Checkpoints that store ‘snapshots’ of the design at specific points in the flow. The Checkpoints are saved in a database format as a design checkpoint file (*.dcp), and can be reloaded into the design space as required.

Altium Designer uses specific commands to access Vivado design Checkpoints, and this now includes support for an alternative command approach introduced in recent versions of the Vivado 2014 toolchain.