I have blogged before on how to import Xilinx ISE projects in Sigasi before (Importing a Xilinx ISE project in Sigasi). In this blog post I show how you can import an existing Vivado project into Sigasi.

If you have a Vivado project which uses one or more IP cores, the project becomes complex quickly. Vivado generates different sources for Simulation and Synthesis. And although VHDL has elegant support for this –entities can have multiple architectures–, Vivado generates duplicate entities instead. This forces you to switch between two complete different views on your project. If you have multiple IP cores this is really annoying.

To make it easier to use Sigasi in combination with Vivado projects, we added a Vivado tcl script to our SigasiProjectCreator Github project . This Vivado tcl script  creates a list of all HDL source files in your Vivado project and writes this list together with the HDL library name to a CSV-file. This CSV-file can be converted to a Sigasi project with the createSigasiProject.py  script:

How to generate a Sigasi project from a Vivado project?

1. Extract a list of source files from your Vivado project with TCL

The following command assumes you’re in a Command Window / Terminal and vivado is in your path. You can also run the script in the TCL console of a Vivado GUI session if you source the script there.

vivado -mode batch -source ~/git/SigasiProjectCreator/src/SigasiProjectCreator/convertVivadoProjectToCsv.tcl project_1.xpr

This TCL scripts creates a file vivado_files.csv which contains a list of VHDL and Verilog source files and their library information. When you inspect the source of this TCL script , you will see that we filter for Simulation source files only. You can switch to synthesis by replacing USED_IN_SIMULATION with USED_IN_SYNTHESIS.

2. Generate the Sigasi project files from the CSV file

python3 ~/git/SigasiProjectCreator/src/createSigasiProject.py project_1 vivado_files.csv

This script generates the .project and .library_mapping.xml files that define the Sigasi project.

Note that you might need to update the PYTHONPATH as explained in the README file .

Notes

When you make changes to your Vivado project, you need to re-run this script. Take care that you also regenerate the VHDL and Verilog sources of your IP cores when you make changes. Vivado does this lazily.

Note that Sigasi cannot decrypt the encrypted Xilinx IP cores. For some IP cores, even the interface (for example, the entity declaration) is encrypted. Since we do not have permission to decrypt this, you may see some unknown declaration errors in your designs.