Choose your version of the Vivado unisim.VCOMPONENTS package

A project targeted for Xilinx components often uses component primitives. Any VHDL file in which these primitives are used should include the following declaration:

library unisim;
use unisim.VCOMPONENTS.all;

If the unisim library is not known yet in your Sigasi Studio project, a Quick Fix allows to easily configure the unisim library for either ISE or Vivado. To use this Quick Fix, hover over the declaration of the unisim library or press Ctrl+1 to open the pop-up where you can choose the Quick Fix. After applying the Quick Fix, the Common Libraries of your project will contain a unisim library and the primitives will be known in Sigasi Studio.

Since release 3.7, Sigasi Studio uses an up-to-date Vivado library and no longer points to the legacy ISE compatible version when choosing the Vivado variant of the Quick Fix. However, there are multiple variants of the VComponents (VCOMP) library. If you look into the unisim folder of your Common Libraries, you’ll see the following files:

• unisim_VCOMP.vhd (7-series and newer primitives)
• retarget_VCOMP.vhd (support for old architecture primitives that are retargeted to their equivalent)
• unisim_retarget_VCOMP.vhd (combines both of the previous files)

In Sigasi Studio 3.7 the choice was made to only add the 7-series and newer primitives in the unisim_VCOMP.vhd file to the unisim library. As a consequence, in projects with code containing old architecture primitives, Sigasi Studio will not recognize the older primitives by default.

If you have a project containing these old primitives, you can easily change the contents of the unisim library by opening the Common Libraries > unisim folder and right-clicking the file you want to add to the unisim library. Then select Set Library > unisim to add the file to, or select Exclude from build to remove the file from the unisim library.

The main reason that by default only the file containing the new primitives is added to the unisim library, is that this way there will be no autocomplete for old primitives when writing new code. We considered that to be the best way for Sigasi Studio to help users write code targeting new devices. At the same time, if you are dealing with code containing old primitives, you will see errors on these primitives and can manually add the required file to the unisim library to resolve these errors.

What do you think: did we make the right choice on this? Or should both old and new primitives be available by default? Leave your comments below or contact our support  department.