Development licencing for Zedboard

[ewalls]

I am currently looking at the following:

https://www.mouser.co.uk/new/digilent/digilent-zedboard-zynq-7000

https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/Digilent/410-248?qs=2QcrrtqkWlkwUTBI63QHXw%3d%3d

On the description of the product it states the following is included as part of the kit: “Vivado Design Suite with device-locked Design Edition license”

What does this mean exactly?

My requirements are as follows:

I want to have two separate development boards on the go simultaneously with different engineers developing on different computers.

Additionally there is the requirement to have “commercial” and “protected” images of the firmware.  These for obvious reasons will have to be generated on separate computers.

I also want to provide the development environment to customers.  If the development licence is device locked would the firmware have to be rebuilt using a separate licence for each board?  This doesn’t seem tenable.How the licencing is likely to work in this situation?

[JColvin]

Hi @ewalls,

As a disclaimer, Xilinx will be the end authority on the answer to your question here as they are the creators of the software and manage the licensing (Digilent just has the Vivado vouchers available with some of our boards), but my understanding is that to use Design Edition features or to generate a bitstream that uses Design Edition features you would need the Design Edition installed on that machine.

However, if you and any other users are just needing to load a bitstream (as opposed to a SDK based project) you could have the bitstream be loaded onto a Zedboard via Digilent Adept and not require the Vivado software on that separate computer.

Let me know if you have any questions about this.

Thanks,
JColvin