Vivado 2019.2 and Vitis Unified Software Platform Installation

Objective: This is a guide on installation of  Vitis Unified Software Platform 2019.2 and Vivado Design Suite 2019.2 on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS.

Recommended prerequisite articles to read:

1. Computer system requirements / physical computer environment that this work is being developed upon

Linux packages prerequisites

The packages listed in this Xilinx Petalinux Tools guide page 10 need to be installed first for a smooth Vivado Installation experience. Once all the packages have been installed, go to the Xilinx Dowloads page. If you have a stable internet connection, I recommend downloading the Xilinx Unified Installer 2019.2: Linux Self Extracting Web Installer. You will be required to sign in (up) into your Xilinx account and the installer download proceeds smoothly.

Navigate to the Downloads directory and make the installer executable:

chmod  +x   vivado_installer_name.bin

You can then begin the installation as root:

sudo                  ./ vivado_installer_name.bin

This will launch the installation GUI:

You will be required to sign to your Xilinx account and to select which tools to install as shown below

In this case, I selected the Vitis option as it contains both the Vivado Suites and AI Inference platforms that I will need in future projects. You can select any of the options that suit your needs.

In the next GUI pages, you will need to select the devices that you need support for.

Depending on your installation, the required installation process disk space may be as high as 100 GB. This is, however, not the final used disk space, which is generally less than half of the installation process disk space. Nevertheless, the Xilinx tools ecosystem is quite bulky and you definitely need to ensure your computer system has abundant disk space.

Depending on your internet connection speeds and machine properties, the whole installation process will generally take between one and half hours to two hours.

After the installation, you can now activate the Vivado Design Suite by selecting the appropriate license that you have in the license manager window. If you bought the Ultra96-V2 Board, it comes with a License coupon that you can use as your activation license. However, this will only give you access to the Zynq Ultrascale + MSoC devices in the Vivado Design Suite i.e. you will not be able to create applications for other target boards such as Kintex-7 KC705 Eval Kit. At this point, it doesn’t hurt to select the 30 day trial license that gives you access to all the installed resources. You can later use the license coupon after expiration of the 30 days.

It should be noted that only Vivado requires a license to use. The Vitis Platform is absolutely free hence no additional step of license activation.

One last thing you have to install is the Xilinx Cable drivers that will allow you to access your board via, for example, JTAG. To do this, navigate to the folder that you just installed the Xilinx tools and locate the install_drivers folder as shown below.

To open Vivado, go to the bin folder and run the script vivado

While the above is all good and working; we would want to be able to run/launch Vivado from anywhere in the bash terminal, without having to navigate to the exact vivado script folder.

This is accomplished by adding the above script path to the PATH variable in the .bashrc file as shown below:

~$                                            vim     ~/.bashrc

Edit this file as shown below

We can now launch Vivado from anywhere by just the command vivado

Similarly, we would love to have the ability to launch the Vitis Unified Software Platform from anywhere in the terminal by following the steps below:

Locate the Vitis launcher. Its default installation path is:

/tools/Xilinx/Vitis/2019.2/bin

Add this path to the PATH in the bashrc file as shown below:

~$                                            vim     ~/.bashrc

Now Vitis can be launched from anywhere in the terminal by the command vitis

With the above installation set up, we can develop FPGA and software applications targeting various Xilinx products. Personally, I will be developing on the Kintex-7 KC705 Eval Kit and the Zynq Ultrascale + MSoC Ultra96-V2 Board. Nevertheless, all Xilinx products are supported by the installed products we just finished. The caveat is that the Vivado Design Suite will require a license. This is mainly for users that want to develop low-level FPGA designs using RTL such as Verilog or VHDL.