newbie question for using emulator build

Altera_Forum · ‎02-15-2016

I installed Altera SDK on my system without any FPGA board.

I want to try the sw before ordering the hw.

I build a fft1d example. I used the makefile which gives error when I run:

Query for number of devices failed

Then i did some search and found a compile command to build with emulator:

which generated fft1d.aoco fft1d.aocx.

Now how can I run the generated and emulated program on my system which doesn't have a FPGA board yet?

Thanks.

Altera_Forum · ‎02-26-2016

Have you run the emulator? Than that is, as far as I know the furthest you can get without any board.

What do you mean by system? The computer with peripherals or a stand-alone apparatus?

Altera_Forum · ‎02-29-2016

To run the emulator, you have to use the OpenCL emulator libraries that come with the toolkit. You also have to set some environment variables to tell it which board to emulate. The OpenCL libraries will then work like regular OpenCL but run the code on the CPU, which is rather slow. The aocx has to be built for the emulator. The emulator can not emulate FPGA images. The emulator also cannot tell you anything about how fast your code will be on the FPGA. It is only useful to verify the correctness of your code without going through the complex build process.