Description
A block design (.bd), is a complex system of interconnected IP cores created in the IP integrator of the Vivado Design Suite. The Vivado IP integrator lets you create complex system designs by instantiating and interconnecting IP from the Vivado IP catalog. A block design is a hierarchical design which can be written to a file (.bd) on disk, but is stored as a diagram object within the Vivado tool memory.
Block designs are typically constructed at the interface level for increased productivity, but can also be edited at the port or pin level, to provide greater control. A Vivado Design Suite project can incorporate multiple diagrams, at different levels of the design hierarchy, or can consist of a single diagram as the top-level design.
Related Objects
As seen in Figure 1, the diagram object contains other IP integrator block design (bd) objects such as bd_cells, bd_nets, and bd_ports. The relationship between these objects is similar to the relationship between the standard netlist objects of cells, pins, and nets. You can get each object of the Block Design: cell, address space, address segment, net, pin, port, interface net, interface pin, and interface port from a specified diagram object.
For instance, get the nets of the Block Design with the following Tcl command:
get_bd_nets -of_objects [current_bd_design]Properties
The following table lists the properties assigned to a diagram object in the Vivado Design Suite, with example values:
Property Type Read-only Visible Value
CLASS string true true diagram
COLOR string false true
FILE_NAME string true true design_1.bd
NAME string true true design_1
USE_IP_SHARED_DIR bool false true 1
The properties of the diagram object can be reported using the following command:
report_property -all [lindex [get_bd_designs] 0]