Step 3: Elaborating the RTL Design - 2021.2 English

Vivado Design Suite Tutorial: Design Flows Overview

Document ID
UG888
Release Date
2021-10-27
Version
2021.2 English

The Vivado IDE includes an RTL analysis and IP customizing environment. There are also several RTL Design Rule Checks (DRCs) to examine ways to improve performance or power on the RTL design.

  1. Select Open Elaborated Design in the Flow Navigator to elaborate the design.
    Tip: A dialog box appears informing you that your current settings will slow down netlist elaboration. You can click OK to continue or Cancel to return to your project and edit your Elaboration Settings, available in the Flow Navigator.
  2. Ensure that the Layout Selector pull down menu in the main Toolbar has Default Layout selected.

    The Elaborated Design enables various analysis views including an RTL Netlist, Schematic, and Graphical Hierarchy. The views have a cross-select feature, which helps you to debug and optimize the RTL.

  3. Explore the logic hierarchy in the RTL Netlist window and examine the Schematic.

    You can traverse the schematic by double-clicking on cells to push into the hierarchy, or by using commands like the Expand Cone or Expand/Collapse from the Schematic popup menu. Refer to the Vivado Design Suite User Guide: Using the Vivado IDE (UG893) for more information on using the Schematic window.

  4. Select any logic instance in the Schematic and right-click to select the Go to Source or Go to Definition commands.

    The Text Editor opens the RTL source file for the selected cell with the logic instance highlighted. In the case of the Go to Definition command, the RTL source file containing the module definition is opened. With Go to Source, the RTL source containing the instance of the selected cell is opened.

  5. Click the Messages window at the bottom of the Vivado IDE, and examine the messages.
  6. Click the Collapse All button in the Messages toolbar.
  7. Expand the Elaborated Design and the synth_design -rtl -name rtl_1 messages.

    Notice there are links in the messages to open the RTL source files associated with a message.

  8. Click one of the links and the Text Editor opens the RTL source file with the relevant line highlighted.
  9. Close the Text Editor windows.
  10. Close the Elaborated Design by clicking on the X on the right side of the Elaborated Design window banner, and click OK to confirm.