April 25, 2022

FPGA - Xybo board and Vivado - a first reconnaissance

I click the "Vivado 2021.2" icon on my Fedora 35 desktop, wait quite a long time, and eventually the GUI comes up. Under "Quick Start", I select "Create Project" and am presented with a series of dialogs.

Vivado calls itself "Vivado ML edition", which may be important if there are other flavors of Vivado out in the wild.

The first dialog asks me to give a project name and location for the project. Since I am not really serious yet and just seeing how this goes, I accept the default of /home/tom/project_1.

Next I am asked to selet a project type. There are 5 choices. RTL Project is at the top and is preselected, but choice number 5 is "example project" which is too tempting to avoid, so I select example project.

Now I am offered a choice of templates. I can browse the choices and read a description or sometimes see a block diagram in the description frame. I end up selecting the last choice (Zynq-7000 Design Presets).

Now I am offered a choice of "board or part". I only get two choices. 

Zynq-7 ZC702 eval board
Zynq-7 ZC706 eval board
This is disappointing. I had hoped that the Zybo might appear amongst the list. I can use the "back" button and try all the templates and then see what board choices they offer. Indeed each template seems to offer a different set of board choices (including something called a "Versal"). Sometimes we even get cute pictures of the boards. No Zybo ever shows up. We finally end the whole game by selecting "Cancel" and decide that we need to view more Zybo/Vivado videos.

At the risk of getting entirely distracted, the Versal is another Xilinx product. They love to grind out endless new phrases, here the new lingo is "ACAP" along with some kind of doubletalk claiming that a Versal is not an FPGA. They are apparently trying to distance themselves from the "FPGA company" label and are aiming at some kind of new identity as offering "application accelerators".

I do some searching of "Zybo Vivado Webpack" and the main thing I see is the advice that I need to find and install "board files", however one fellow says:

"...board files aren't really all that necessary. They're basically just packaged up pin constraints, with a few additional odds and ends. I have never bothered with board files personally, just plug in the device part number and you're good to go. Only time they're really useful is if you have no other documentation (schematic or pin constraints) as you can pull the pin constraints out of the board files since they're just xml.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org