Open-Source, Modular, Graphical FPGA Board-Level Simulator

Abstract

This paper presents a software FPGA board simulator having Xilinx's Vivado toolchain as a backend. It offers a GUI interface to basic components such as LEDs, buttons, and switches, and may be configured to run with virtually any board without recompilation, which is very useful as a teaching/self-teaching/training tool. Both combinational and sequential circuits are supported if described in Verilog HDL. Their output is shown on the proposed GUI environment resembling various specific boards, not just on waveforms as in usual digital design simulators. The testbench can be expressed as user interaction instead of non-synthesizable code.