Primary Clocks - 2022.1 English

Vivado Design Suite User Guide: Using Constraints (UG903)

Document ID
UG903
Release Date
2022-06-01
Version
2022.1 English

A primary clock is a board clock that enters the design through an input port or a gigabit transceiver output pin (for example, a recovered clock).

A primary clock can be defined only by the create_clock command.

Note: Primary clocks must be defined on a gigabit transceiver output only for Xilinx 7 series FPGAs. For UltraScale™ and UltraScale+™ devices, the timer automatically derives clocks on the GT output ports.

A primary clock must be attached to a netlist object. This netlist object represents the point in the design from which all the clock edges originate and propagate downstream on the clock tree. In other words, the source point of a primary clock defines the time zero used by the Vivado IDE when computing the clock latency and uncertainty used in the slack equation.

Important: The Vivado IDE ignores all clock tree delays coming from cells located upstream from the point at which the primary clock is defined. If you define a primary clock on a pin in the middle of the design, only part of its latency is used for timing analysis. This can be a problem if this clock communicates with other related clocks in the design, because the skew, and consequently the slack, value between the clocks can be inaccurate.

Primary clocks must be defined first, because other timing constraints often refer to them.