Installing Xilinx Vivado on Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04

Updates

2024-07-10 update to Vivado 2024.1

2023-12-20 update to Vivado 2023.2

2024-08-20 update instruction for Ubuntu 24.04

1. Download and Install Vivado

Download Vivado installer from download page.

After download, run the following command to grant executable right to the binary file.

chmod +x ~/Downloads/FPGAs_AdaptiveSoCs_Unified_2024.1_0522_2023_Lin64.bin

Then, run the file using

sudo ~/Downloads/FPGAs_AdaptiveSoCs_Unified_2024.1_0522_2023_Lin64.bin

In the pop-up window, log in with AMD account.

Select "Vivado".

Select "Vivado ML Standard"

Select the desired installation contents. Here is a brief mapping for the common FPGAs:

FPGA Board	Entry
Arty 35T / Arty 100T	Production Devices -> 7 Series -> Artix-7
vcu118	Production Devices -> UltraScale+ -> Virtex UltraScale+

Accept the License Agreements.

Select the installation path. Here, we will be using /home/tk/Documents/Xilinx/.

Summary Page

2. Install Additional Dependencies

Install Vivado runtime dependencies:

Ubuntu 24.04

libtinfo5 is no longer supported on Ubuntu 24.04 by default, so we need to download the version from older release.

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/n/ncurses/libtinfo5_6.4-2ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i libtinfo5_6.4-2ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb

Ubuntu 22.04

sudo apt install libtinfo5

3. Launching Vivado

By default, vivado can only be executed by invoking the program with the installation path:

~/Documents/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.1/bin/vivado

To be able to directly invoke vivado, we need to add the installational path to PATH environment variable. Optionally, add this command to ~/.bashrc file to support launching vivado in new terminals.

# Vivado
source /home/tk/Documents/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.1/settings64.sh

To make the change effective, run

source ~/.bashrc

4. Install cable drivers

To connect to FPGA boards, we need to install additional USB drivers by running the following command.

cd ~/Documents/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.1/data/xicom/cable_drivers/lin64/install_script/install_drivers/
sudo ./install_drivers

5. Install board support files

Download the most recent Master Branch ZIP Archive of Digilent's vivado-boards Github repository and extract it.

Open the folder extracted from the archive and navigate to its new/board_files/ folder. You will be copying all of this folder's subfolders.

Open Vivado installation path ~/Documents/Xilinx/Vivado/. Under this folder, navigate to its <version>/data/boards/board_files/ directory (e.g. ~/Documents/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.1/data/boards/board_files/). If this folder doesn't exist, create it.

Copy all of the folders under vivado-boards' new/board_files/ folder, then paste them into this folder.

Or do it using terminal commands:

Copy

sudo cp -r ~/Downloads/vivado-boards-master/new/board_files/ ~/Documents/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.1/data/boards/

References

Official Tutorial

Installing Vivado, Xilinx SDK, and Digilent Board Files - Digilent Reference