Ovenbird

A tool for merging the MyHDL workflow with Vivado (and possibly other tools further down the line).

The emphasis at this stage is on extending the Veriutils toolkit to support Vivado.

This involves two core features:

1. The vivado_vhdl_cosimulation and vivado_verilog_cosimulation functions. These are functionally equivalent to veriutils.myhdl_cosimulation (albeit with a couple of extra arguments), but run the device under test inside the Vivado simulator.

2. The VivadoIP block. This allows Vivado IP blocks (notably encrypted IP) to be included and controlled in a MyHDL hierarchy, with vivado_*_cosimulation using the correct IP block. Encrypted IP is not functionally accessible inside MyHDL, so it is necessary to reimplement the functionality of the block for MyHDL simulation. This is not as serious a drawback as one might initially imagine as the MyHDL implementation does not need to be convertible and typically the IP blocks can be easily implemented using the full power of Python (and all the libraries available) - indeed, in implementing the Python model of the IP block, you'll understand it properly.

The best way of understanding how to use the tool is by looking at the examples in the examples directory, which also serve as a test bench.

The examples demonstrate using Vivado with an IP block integrated with MyHDL, both standalone (dsp48e1.py) and as part of a hierarchy (simple_wrapper.py).

In order to use Vivado, it is necessary to set up your environment. Under linux, this is something like:

source /opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2019.2/settings64.sh

I imagine there's something similar under Windows (though I've not tested it).

If the executable is not in the path, the relevant tests will be skipped, or if you try to use the Vivado cosimulation, an EnvironmentError will be raised.

Again, to use the Vivado capability, it is necessary to have a veriutils.cfg file in the current working directory to configure the part being used. An example one is provided. The need for veriutils.cfg will likely be removed in subsequent releases (much of the need for it has been removed in the creation of Ovenbird).

Ovenbird depends on the MyHDL initial value support, which is now part of MyHDL master.

The code is released under the BSD 3 clause license. See License.txt for the text of this.