If a user's original XDC uses wildcards, Vivado design tools will honor the constraints, but does not preserve the wildcards when writing out a checkpoint.
This may lead to much more memory being required to open the dcp than was originally required to process the design and constraints.
As such, in Vivado tools 2012.4, when trying to open the post_route.dcp in some cases, Vivado tools will crash with a GUI memory related error.
The post_route.dcp can be opened in 2013.1. However, when "write_xdc -file" is performed on the checkpoint, a much larger XDC file is generated due to the expanded wildcards.
Until this is fixed, the best workaround is to evaluate the constraints to see if any constraints with wildcards are being expanded further than expected.
For the one test case, the culprit was:
set_multicycle_path -setup -start -from [get_pins {*CmdBurstCntY[*]/C} -hierarchical] -to [get_pins -match_style ucf "i_TopDDR3Ctrl_1/*"] 2
The issue was overcome by modifying this constraint to:
set_multicycle_path -setup -start -from [get_cells * -hierarchical -filter {NAME =~ *CmdBurstCntY[*]}] -to [get_cells * -hierarchical -filter {NAME =~ i_TopDDR3Ctrl_1/*}] 2