Displayport IP licence

[miakatt]

Hi all. 

I work for a company in the UK. We have an electronics board that we use to control displays via the displayport. 

We commissioned a contractor to write our RTL code, which works very well. However, the contractor did not have the full displayport licence. Therefore our present code is compiled with the trial version and times out after a few hours. 

The full licence costs £15k. We may only need to compile the code once to have a fully working system. It seems strange that we, as the end-user should need to purchase the IP licence for a single project, as the licence would be node locked to the developer's PC (I think).

Is there an alternative way we can get the full displayport IP operational on our hardware without purchasing the licence? For example, could we pay a developer who already has the displayport IP (maybe someone on this forum) to rebuild our code so we can load it on to our devices?

Thank you in advance for any advice.

A. 

[chinmays]

Hi @miakatt,

Node-locked licenses can be rehosted. Each end user and license administrator is given a set number of license rehosts (refer to AR#36136 for more information). If someone in your organisation or in your contact has the required license, they can perform a rehosting of license from their account and lock it to mac address (or disk serial number) of a different machine. 

Thanks,

Chinmay

[miakatt]

Hi @chinmays

Thank you for replying so promptly.

So am I correct in saying it is the PC used for flashing the fpga that must have the licence, rather than the PC that generates the bitstream or mcs files? 

We don't have anyone in our organisation who does FPGA development  and the contactor who developed the rtl used the trial version. 

I would like to find a way to test our hardware fully, before purchasing the licence. But our training tests require several hours, longer than the trial IP generally runs for. 

Thanks for your support

A. 

[chinmays]

Hi @miakatt,

License checkpoints are applied at Synthesis, implementation and write_bitstream. So you need a license key in the machine which generates bitstream but if the bitstream is generated through an IP evaluation license then the bits will expire after a certain period of time. I think in your case the bitstream were generated using an evaluation license, it needs to be reloaded after a certain amount of time. If your tests require more time then a full license key is required. 

Thanks,

Chinmay 

[miakatt]

Hi @chinmays

Thank you for the clarification. 

My company has offices in the UK and in the US. Both would want to be able to load fully licenced displayport code on to their local hardware. 
Does this mean we (as a company) would have to purchase a licence for each location? Or can we purchase one licence (say, in the US), that can remotely write the bitstream to the hardware in the UK? Is this possible with something like "vcse_server"? 

[anatoli · Accepted solution]

Hello @miakatt,

Please be aware of the types of IP licenses available to purchase.

In relation to the IP Core licenses, these come as Site, Project and Worldwide, i.e.:

A "site license" is a license for a specific site. For example, if Xilinx had a site license for MicroBlaze, everyone at Xilinx within a five-mile radius would be under the license agreement (the "site license" is defined by a five-mile radius). 

 There is also a “Project license” which only allows use of the core in a single project. A "project" is defined to be a single board that is programmed using multiple bitstreams containing the core, or multiple boards that are programmed by a single bitstream containing the core.

The above is explained in this Answer Record: https://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/45589.html

 Whereas, a “Worldwide license” is NOT defined by a five-mile radius and it is not specific to a single project. If there are many other users around the world are working on parts of the same/different design, they are allowed to log in and generate and use this Worldwide license no matter where they are based in the world, without breaking EULA.

Also Site, Project and Worldwide licenses are not constrained to a number of seats.
When you generate any of these licenses as a floating license, the license will be given 9999 seats as shown in the following example.

# This is a permanent license generated on Tue Jun 03 16:29:25 UTC 2014

INCREMENT pci_express xilinxd 2013.08 permanent 9999 61355226A4B4 \

VENDOR_STRING=License_Type:Bought;howardp,pci_express,ip,permanent,_27773986_172415124_176082857_627 \

The user can generate as many floating or nodelock license files as they wish (i.e. after generation, the entitlement is still the same on the licensing page).

The user/administrator is required by EULA to establish a control of the scope of availability.

Therefore, Worldwide/Project IP Core license is what you'd be considering in purchasing. With that then, you can either generate this as a Floating license and have it run on the USA floating license sever and once the UK experts have access to this particular server (locally on their particular PCs in UK), then Vivado would be able to grab the required licenses from this floating license server in the USA. 

You can also generate this license as a node-locked license to individual people/engineers, specifically targeting their particular machine's MAC/Host ID, as this is also an option if you'd buy a Worldwide or a Project type of an IP Core license.

I hope the above is clear.

If further explanation is needed, please let us know.

[miakatt]

@anatoli

Thank you. That's really helped in my understanding. I'm trying to find a price for the Displayport project licence (avnet only sell the site licence).

But now I'm sure we're making the right purchase. 

Thanks again.