Use of TCL in Vivado

TCL Introduction

Vivado is the latest Xilinx FPGA design tool that supports the development of FPGA and ZYNQ 7000 in the 7 series. Vivado can be said to be a completely new design compared to the previous Ise design suite. Whether from the interface, settings, algorithms, or from the user's idea of the requirements, are brand-new. Look at Vivado, Tcl has become the only supported script

TCL (read as Tickle) was born in the 80 's University of California, Berkeley, as a simple and efficient portability of good scripting language, is now widely used in almost all EDA tools. The most important feature of TCL is that its grammatical format is extremely simple or even rigid, using purely [command option parameters] as a veritable "tool command language" (ie, Tcl's full name, Language).

In fact, TCL can be very powerful, and the program can be very complex, but to be used in Vivado or most other EDA tools, you only need to master the most basic parts.

With Tcl, Vivado has a powerful design analysis capability
? Problems in the rapid positioning design
? Reduce design Iteration Cycles

Windows Key + E Open File Browser

Path: E:\VivadoProject\ZynqHW_Lab3_Solution\ZynqDesign\ZynqDesign.srcs\sources_1\bd\Z_system

Preparatory work

You first need to set the environment variable, add the path to the Vivado in the PATH environment variable, and set the path to the Bin folder, for example C:\Xilinx\Vivado\2014.1\bin

Under the Windows interface, start, run, enter CMD, and open the Windows command line terminal. There are three options at this time:

1. Enter "Vivado", launch the Vivado GUI interface, and click on the desktop icon to launch Vivado is no different; in fact, directly clicking on the desktop icon is invoking the Windows Batch command to start Vivado

2.
2. Enter "Vivado-modebatch-source FILE.TCL" to launch Vivado from the script batch, execute the FILE.TCL file directly after running
3. Enter "VIVADO-MODETCL" to start the TCL Interactive command line.

3.

Note: The environment variable needs to be configured, otherwise it will appear when CMD

Tcl is a scripting language that makes it easy for users to define their own commands, and Xilinx adds a lot of VIVADO commands on that basis. For Vivado custom non-standard TCL command, after entering this command, continue to enter the space + "-help", you can find the detailed explanation of the command.

Configuration of environment variables:

Environment variables are generally used in the operating system to specify the operating system running environment of some parameters, such as temporary folder location and System folder location. This is a bit like the default path of a DOS period, and when you run some programs, you look in the default path to the settings in addition to looking in the current folder. Simply put, the "path" here is a variable that stores some of the directory paths that are stored in common commands.

Right-click the computer, select Properties, locate and open advanced system configuration. On the next page, click Advanced System Configuration to open the System Properties window.

Advanced-Environment variables

Add the path to the Vivado in the PATH environment variable, set the path to the Bin folder

At this point, the environment variable does not take effect and requires restarting the computer or restarting the Explore.exe

Restart Explorer.exe, environment variable configuration complete and effective

Getting Started with Tcl mode

TCL Console

Enter TCL command line, CD + file path ... Open Project

Note: The file path that is copied in the file browser path is not the same slash, you need to change the right slash ...

Copyright NOTICE: This article for Bo Master original article, without Bo Master permission not reproduced.

Use of TCL in Vivado