Xilinx System Generator v2.1 Reference Guide
3 and simply use floating point operations in hardware. The answer is that most operations have a sufficiently small dynamic range that a fixed point representation is acceptable, and the hardware realization of fixed point is considerably cheaper.
The System Generator Design Flow
Simulink provides a graphical environment for creating and modeling dynamical systems. System Generator consists of a Simulink library called the Xilinx Blockset, and software to translate a Simulink model into a hardware realization of the model. System Generator maps system parameters defined in Simulink (e.g. as mask variables in Xilinx Blockset blocks), into entities and architectures, ports, signals, and attributes in a hardware realization. In addition, System Generator automatically produces command files for FPGA synthesis, HDL simulation, and implementation tools, so that the user can work entirely in graphical environments in going from system specification to hardware realization.
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