Evaluate Your Kernel Through Simulation
The Questa*-Intel® FPGA Edition simulator software assesses the
functionality of your kernel.
The simulator flow generates a simulation binary file that runs
on the host. The hardware portion of your code is evaluated in an RTL
simulator, and the host portion is executed natively on the processor.
This feature allows you to simulate the functionality of your kernel and
iterate on your design without needing to compile your kernel to
hardware and running on the FPGA each time.
The performance of the simulator is very slow when compared to that
of hardware. So, Intel recommends using a smaller data set for
testing.
Use the simulator when you want an insight into the dynamic performance
of your kernel and more information about the functional correctness of
your kernel than emulation or the reporting tools provide.
The simulator is cycle accurate and bit-accurate. It has a netlist
identical to the generated hardware and can provide full waveforms for
debugging. View the waveforms with Siemens* EDA (
formerly Mentor
Graphics
) Questa* software.