At its core, a Design Linking License is a non-exclusive, limited-use agreement. It allows developers to integrate high-value Xilinx or third-party IP into their Vivado or Vitis environments for the purpose of .
During IP integration, Vivado builds a dependency graph. If it detects two distinct IP cores with license requirements that exceed the basic "single IP evaluation" mode, it triggers a check for the linking feature. Failure results in: xilinx design linking license