Xilinx enforces the Xilinx End-User License Agreement at run time in the Xilinx design tools using certificate-based licensing.
Important: Starting with
Vivado 2017.3 - Activation Licensing support has
been removed. Existing activation licenses have been replaced with certificate-based
license that can be accessed from www.xilinx.com/getlicense.
A certificate, commonly referred to as a “license file (.lic)” is issued from the Xilinx Product Licensing Site. The certificate is matched to a given machine, server or licensing dongle using your entering host-id which uniquely identifies the machine. This license certificate must remain present on the machine and in the license search path, because the Vivado tools need access to this file to check for a valid license feature during run time.
Note: Flex-ID Dongle licensing for
Xilinx Software is supported only on Windows
platforms.