Creating Your Own Libraries

You can create your own libraries of frequently used components, especially if you want to share parts of your designs with other people on your system.

You can make new library components either by editing the soft macros provided by Xilinx and saving them under another name, or simply by saving schematic blocks of your own design.

To create your own library, follow these steps.

1. Create a directory for the library. You can place it anywhere on the system. First, navigate to the directory where you want to create the library directory. Then use the mkdir command to create the library directory.
   
   mkdir userlib
   
   
2. Using the Project Manager for Workview Office, add a new library in the Library Search Order. Add the following information.
   
   Path: c:\xilinx\userlib
   
   Alias: userlib
   
   Type: Writable
   
   On workstations, use a text editor to modify your viewdraw.ini file to include the new library on your search path. Add the following line in the viewdraw.ini file.
   
   DIR [w] /tools/xilinx/userlib (userlib)
   
   In either case, place this user library after the primary library, but before the Xilinx libraries. Define the explicit path to the new library directory, unless the library resides below the project directory.
   
   
3. Open ViewDraw and enter a schematic for the component.
   
   
4. Make a symbol for the component. See “Design Entry” chapter for instructions on creating symbols.
   
   
5. When you save the schematic and symbol, specify the location as the new user library. After saving, ViewDraw creates the sch, sym, and wir directories in the user library directory.
   
   
6. You can optionally use the Mega program to compress the library into megafile format. However, to make changes to your library, you must skip this step until all changes are complete. The megafile format is read-only.
   
   

If you choose to compress your library into megafile format, you must specify the Type as Megafile in Project Manager, or use [m] instead of [w] in the viewdraw.ini file.

You can now specify any component from your user library and place it in your schematic as you would place a Xilinx component.