Installing Vivado Locally

Table of Contents

You will go to the Xilinx website and download and install a copy of Vivado to run.

If you choose this option, YOU WILL NOT use the J: drive to hold all your files. You will have them all local to your machine, presumably on your C: drive.

NOTES:

  • Your usage will represent the most common way the Xilinx software is run by others.
  • The tools run fastest locally.
  • Vivado also provides a way to program your FPGA board so you need not download anything else – it is self-contained and matches what is done in the labs.
  • But, it may take a couple of hours to set up and will take up to 20-40 GB of disk space on your machine.
  • The Xilinx web page changes regularly — the instructions here may be slightly different from what you see. But, the differences are usually just cosmetic.

Instructions

Xilinx provides a “free” version of the Vivado tools for student use called “WebPack”. This is a limited version of the tool that only works with a few of the FPGAs that Xilinx manufactures. Fortunately, it supports the FPGA we are using for our class. If you have access to a computer/laptop with plenty of hard drive space (the compressed image is about 10 GB and expands to about 25 GB) and a decent processor, you may want to pursue this route. Make sure you download version 2019.2.

  1. Go to www.xilinx.com (note that their website changes regularly so the instructions may be a bit out of date within weeks of being written)
  2. Click Products (up top), then Hardware Development (left side), then Vivado Design Suite (left side), then Download Vivado (mid-right of screen), then Vivado Archive (left side), then 2019.2.
  3. Scroll down and find “Vivado Design Suite – HLx Editions – 2019.2 Full Product Installation” and then below it find “Vivado HLx 2019.2: WebPACK and Editions – Windows Self Extracting Web Installer (EXE – 64.62 MB)”. Just be aware there are lots of versions, and they are adding new ones regularly – find this one.
  4. Click on it.
  5. This will then require you to create an account at Xilinx in order to download. You can use BYU’s address for your address if you would like (EB450, Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602).
  6. If it asks for your research you can just put “digital design”. Once you have an account it will ask you to log in again and you will likely have to re-navigate to the download button. Then, click Download.
  7. And, you will need your Xilinx login and password later in the install process so keep it handy.
  8. Double-click the downloaded file (it should be around 60-70MB in size).
  9. When prompted, be sure to select “Vivado HL WebPACK version”. The defaults for the most part are OK for the rest. As shown here, you can minimize the install size by de-selecting a number of things (like SDK, UltraScale, and UltraScale+ devices). Also, be SURE that the box for installing cable drivers is selected.

That should do it.

With Vivado on your machine, you can do EVERYTHING on your local machine (both run Vivado to do designs as well as download to your board).