For the most up to date version of this guide, please visit Installing Vivado, Vitis, and Digilent Board Files.
This guide will help you obtain Vivado Board Files for the Nexys 4, Nexys 4 DDR, Basys 3, Arty, Nexys Video, and Zybo FPGA Boards.
Follow this Wiki guide on how to install and activate Vivado on your PC. Installing Vivado
After installing Vivado, the default installation directory on your drive will contain a folder called board_parts. If Vivado is installed in the C drive ( usually recommended ), then the board_parts folder can be found here: C:\Xilinx\Vivado\201X.X\data\boards.
By default this folder contains XML files for different FPGA boards manufactured by Xilinx.
XML files define different interfaces on the board. Interfaces such as Slide Switches, Push Buttons, LEDs, USB-UART, DDR Memory, Ethernet etc.
Digilent has created XML files for the Artix 7 FPGA boards:
In the AXI GPIO IP customization window, you will be able to assign different interfaces that are available on your selected board to a specific GPIO IP block.
Download and extract this Zip file: https://github.com/Digilent/vivado-boards/archive/master.zip
You can also check out the repository for the board files on github located here
This zip file will contain a folder called board_parts. Save this in your user documents folder. We will copy this board_parts folder, navigate to the board_parts folder inside the Vivado Installation directory, and merge them both.
The newly added files will each contain a sub-folder for the current board revision. This sub-folder contains the respective XML files for each FPGA board.
The sub-folder for the nexys4_ddr will contain an additional file called mig.prj which is the Xilinx Memory Interface Generator description file for customizing the DDR2 component on the Nexys 4 DDR.
You are now ready to start a new IP Integrator based Vivado project for the Digilent Nexys 4, Nexys 4 DDR and Basys 3 FPGA Boards.