In the lecture I am going to go through and explain which devices and development boards are currently supported by Vivado Design Suite. Vivado is a Xilinx product and therefore if you are using an Altera development board or FPGA you will not be able to use this tool to develop a configuration file for your board / device. Digilent is a Xilinx vendor and all of their development boards are supported by Xilinx, however be sure to see the supported FPGA’s and development boards below as not all the Xilinx boards sold on Digilent are supported by Vivado for development.

Supported FPGAs Vivado is developed and supported by Xilinx therefore the tool only supports development for Xilinx FPGA’s and SoC’s. Not all Xilinx FPGA’s are supported by Vivado, only the high performance 7 series devices are supported as listed below:

Virtex-7
Kintex-7
Artix-7
Zynq-7000

Note that these are the devices that are supported as of Vivado 2016.3, currently the Spartan series family is not supported. If you are wondering whether or not your FPGA is supported; create a new project in Vivado and when the wizard asks you to select your device, check to see if your device is an option. If you don’t see your device, then the version of Vivado you are using doesn’t support the FPGA you are looking for. Also note that the Zynq is a special FPGA in that it has a hard core ARM processor on the chip as well. The Zynq chips have the same FPGA fabric as the Artix-7 or Kintex-7 series FPGA, based on the specific part.

Supported Development Boards When working with Vivado you must use a development board that contains one of the Xilinx FPGA’s listed above. Below is a list of some of the more popular development boards supported by Vivado:

BASYS 3 Board - Utilizes an Artix-7 FPGA, this is the development board I will using for the examples in this course.

ARTY Board - Uses the same Artix-7 FPGA as the BASYS 3, however has some different peripherals to interface with.

All of these development boards can be purchased from Digilent’s website, from the link posted above. I will be using the BASYS 3 development board as I post examples throughout this course. Any Xilinx development board supported by Vivado will work. All of my examples that are specifically board related will be able to be translated to make them work for your board.

Important Remember you do not need a development board to complete this course, it is completely optional. However, it’s much more fun to actually use what you learned to program a Xilinx FPGA development board!