Best Practices - 2023.2 English

Vivado Design Suite User Guide: Creating and Packaging Custom IP (UG1118)
Document ID
UG1118
Release Date
2023-11-06
Version
2023.2 English
  • Keep encryption keys and pragmas in a key file and point to it using encrypt -key option.
  • Use the encrypt -ext option to avoid inadvertently overwriting input files.
  • Obtain public keys from tool vendors.
    CAUTION:
    Beware cutting and pasting from PDF and Word documents as these operations often corrupt the key; corruption is usually not apparent until the file is subsequently decrypted resulting in syntax errors.
  • Use the same key file for as much IP as possible, which allows greater optimization of the resulting netlist.
  • Encrypt all the files of an IP in a single call to encrypt.
  • Do not split a Verilog module between multiple encryption blocks and/or plain text sections.
  • In VHDL, put the entire entity and architecture pair in a single encryption block.
  • Verify that the encrypted code loads correctly into Vivado and a subsequentwrite_verilog re-encrypts all the secure design elements.
  • Verify interoperability with third-party tools.