FPGA design and verification using Simulink

By Justin Delva, Ben Chan, and Shay Seng, Xilinx
January 14, 2008 -- dspdesignline.com

Xilinx System Generator for DSP is a MATLAB Simulink block set that facilitates system design. Targeting Xilinx FPGAs within the familiar MATLAB environment, System Generator for DSP gives you the ability to functionally simulate a design and use the MATLAB environment to verify bit- and cycle-true models against the golden reference results. These reference results can be produced either externally or inside the MATLAB environment, and you can target a Xilinx FPGA hardware platform all from within MATLAB. System Generator complements HDL design tasks by providing an easily configured test bench for both functional simulation and hardware verification. You can simulate your HDL code within MATLAB by using the built-in interface to HDL simulators like ModelSim. A System Generator for DSP test bench platform built around the HDL code provides a powerful yet fast simulation environment that interacts seamlessly with ModelSim. Setting up this environment is easy.

You can use this same environment to test your HDL code running in real hardware without any modifications. The hardware co-simulation system uses pre-supported FPGA platforms such as the Xilinx ML506 board for performing either a Simulink-controlled stepped clock hardware run or a real-time data-burst run.

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